1958 To 1961
Columbia Records released a Town Hall Party LP album in 1958, featuring many of the regular cast members of the series. That same year, however, brought changes to the program. NBC radio had discontinued carrying the Saturday night shows, and rising union scale rates made it impossible for Wagnon to keep the huge cast of recording artists on the Compton stage week after week. The band was made smaller and many regular cast members departed in 1958. Billy Mize and Cliff Crofford, talented vocalists/instrumentalists/composers, joined the much smaller cast as band members and soloists.
The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team began playing in Los Angeles in April 1958, drawing many Town Hall patrons to the nearby Coliseum. In 1959 the new Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series.
In late December 1958 the newly opened Showboat Hotel in Las Vegas began to put on Town Hall Party shows featuring Tex Ritter, The Collins Kids, and Town Hall regulars, thus drawing them away from the KTTV Saturday night telecasts.
Competition for television viewers was more intense as the new decade began, and KTTV gave notice that Town Hall Party was to be dropped in December, 1960. The final performance at the Compton Town Hall was on January 14, 1961. Other live country and Western music shows were seen on California television at various points in the 1960s, but none featured the large cast of recording artists which Wagnon assembled in the 1950s, glimpses of which may be seen today on films of the syndicated Ranch Party series and on DVD releases of the surviving kinescopes of Town Hall Party.
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