Before they yodeled and hen-clucked their way on to radio shows heard by millions, Mary Jane and Carolyn DeZurik were typical central Minnesota farm girls growing up amid rolling fields six miles east of Royalton.
Granddaughters of Slovak immigrants, they were among seven siblings who milked cows, baled hay, canned vegetables and cleaned the barn and the house. Their father, Joe, played the fiddle and their brother, Jerry, squeezed an accordion. Before long, the sisters were singing and strumming guitars at local barn dances and the Morrison County Fair in Little Falls.
That's usually where early country music stayed — dusty hyperlocal venues such as church basements, barns and bandstands. But the DeZurik sisters would help pioneer country music into the national obsession it is today.
Coming of age during the Depression, the sisters joined the flock of rural kids escaping the increasingly hardscrabble agriculture life for the opportunities available in the big cities. They never forgot their farm upbringing, though, parlaying their past into big-time success.
In 1934, everything changed for these seemingly ordinary teenagers — as Carolyn recalled in a 2003 interview six years before her death at 90. Royalton, she recalled, had a band that played every Wednesday night, led by the town dentist and featuring their Uncle Frank.
"We saw this truck coming up the road and Uncle Frank walked over to us with a big grin on his face and asked us if we'd like to sing with the band tonight. We said: 'What?' "
The girls grew up singing — often imitating the bird songs they heard over the fields and around the chicken coops. Carolyn told her uncle they weren't good enough to sing in public. "But he insisted. He pushed us into it."
With no microphone, the girls sang that night — yodeling in their dizzying array of trills. When they finished the first song, the crowd went berserk. "They screamed. They howled. It was a big success."
