Roundabout paths lead to Chingawassa stage
Staff writer
Jared Barney was just a fan in the front row, beaming up at the nationally recognized bands on stage at last year’s Chingawassa Days.
This year, the industrial mechanic — whose Tampa family and friends didn’t even know he could sing, let alone compose his own lyrics and music — is an act on the Marion stage.
Barney will be opening Saturday for his friend, comedian-musician Jaron Bell, who is watching his own entertainment career finally catch fire.
Bell, a Texas transplant to Salina, and Barney, a 2015 Centre High School graduate, are part of the Kansas face for this year’s Chingawassa Days — Marion’s three-day, family-friendly summer festival with live music, tournaments, contests, races, games, and rides.
Together, they’re second- and third-billed on a weekend that mixes national acts with local flavor, and they represent exactly what Chingawassa is known for: small-town flavor, big laughs, and heartfelt performances.
Bell, who plays big-city events and the rural festival circuit, sees a weekend like Chingawassa Days as “breathing room” for small-town America.
“Drama is alive and well within communities,” he said in a telephone interview, “but when these little-town festivals happen, the cool part is everybody sets that aside. And just for a little while, everything’s OK. We’re not worried about politics. We’re not worried about this or that or budget or city council.”
He sees that spirit built into the way Chingawassa is organized.
“When I play in a bigger city or bigger music festivals, the [selection] committees are music industry people,” he said. “When I play Chingawassa Days, I joke that the people on the committee are the barber, the mayor, the fire chief, and a couple guys that own some businesses downtown —just people that really love their community. And I love that they’re willing to spend money to bring us out.”
Kumbaya aside, neither Kansas performer pulls punches about where they’re performing.
“Marion,” Bell observed, “is the only place in the country that I know about that has a roundabout in the middle of nowhere for no reason.”
And, he added, “I’m trying to figure out this rhino thing.”
Barney often tells people: “I’m Jared Barney from Tampa, Kansas. Don’t act like you know where it’s at. Nobody does…. Yep. I went to school in a cornfield, and when you see it, it’s not a lie.”
Both performers are enjoying leaps of success in their entertainment careers, and the confidence that comes with that will bolster their Marion performances.
Bell, jokes about weighing himself on a grain elevator scale because a bathroom scale couldn’t capture his 380-pound weight, sang his way along for many years with a day job working in a car dealership and raising two boys (his most merciless critics) with his “baby mama, Katie Olsen” in Salina.
“I was still working at a car dealership, and the dream was over,” he said. “I was 38 years old, and the dream was never going to happen.”
He’d been promoted to finance manager and was spending Saturdays chained to a desk, doing car deals instead of sound checks or kids’ sports events.
“So, I just prayed to God and I said, ‘Lord, if you … give me a chance to do this and sing for you, I’ll tell everybody about you everywhere I go,” he said.
In late 2024, he made a joke reel about a Christmas snack cake.
“I posted a video of a Little Debbie Christmas tree, and in seven days, it hit 17 million views,” he said. “Since then, I’ve done a little over 75 million views on social media.”
A record deal followed, then a full-time touring schedule, and a single, “Guys That Make Her Cry,” which was released this year and hit No. 45 on the American country music chart.
Bell is generous with his gratitude, paying it forward. He’s responsible for recognizing Barney’s talent and “tricking him” onto the stage and out of Barney’s own self-imposed obscurity.
Barney had quietly composed songs and played only for himself with a guitar he won in a poker game and a pick he caught that was thrown from the stage at a Parker McCollum concert.
Last December, Bell “texted me one day: ‘Hey, I want you to come with us. Just bring your guitar. And after the show, we can mess around and play a little bit.’ And I was like, OK, that’s innocent enough,” Barney recounted in an online interview while driving home from work last week. “I got 2½ hours away from home before he told me that I was opening the show.”
“I’d never sung into a microphone with a guitar in my hand. There were so many little things that I didn’t know about audio and sound equipment,” he said, describing a set he did opening for Bell at the 1890 Icehouse in Meriden. “I did five songs that night and I think I messed up three or four of them.”
Six months and a lot of performances later, Barney now lands on the same Chingawassa stage he once stared up at.
His repertoire includes an ode to Tampa he’s particularly proud of. It speaks of youthful indiscretions “dodging cops and growing crops” and honoring the late “unofficial town marshal” Donald Mueller, a close family friend, with the line: “the Don keeping us clean.”
When he played the song in Tampa, Mueller’s wife, Francie, heard it, and “it put her in tears; she loved it,” he said. “If I could put somebody in tears about it, then I’m on the right track at least.”