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A decade or more before Bakersfield became the spiritual home for country music in the Central Valley of California, there was the Big Fresno Barn.
The converted dance hall was situated on a rural part of West Shields Avenue that, even now, might be considered the outskirts of town. But from the 1940s well into the 1960s, the venue also known as “Nashville West” was a mainstay for western swing and what would become honky tonk and country music.
“It had no air conditioning, something to be considered with Fresno’s temperatures typically ranging in the 100s during the summer,” Dave Stogner wrote of the barn in a chronicle of his life titled “Only a Memory Away.”
“But the side windows could be dropped down about three feet to circulate the air.”
Stogner, who in 2021 was inducted into the first class of the Valley Music Hall of Fame, booked bands and managed the venue during its heyday. The barn had a “genuine hardwood dance floor that was one of the best in California” and “plenty of seating all the way around the place with bench seats and chairs along the walls, and booths and tables,” Stonger wrote.