The origin story of Crack The Sky, the progressive rock band that became a sensation and legend in Baltimore, if nowhere else, could have been the inspiration for a couple of music-rich movies, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “The Blues Brothers.” I’ll tell you why.

In the latter, the John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd-led band famously performs to a crowd that had come to hear country-western music, not blues and soul. The crowd turns hostile, throwing beer bottles at the Blues Brothers until they change their tune to the theme from “Rawhide,” the 1960s TV show about cattle drivers.

Something like this happened to Crack The Sky during its early tours in the mid-1970s.

Booked to play My Father’s Place on New York’s Long Island, the band found itself caught in the club’s transition from a rundown country-western bar to a spruced-up rock venue.

“We opened for the Earl Scruggs review,” recalls guitarist Rick Witkowski in a new book about Crack The Sky. “Earl Scruggs co-wrote the ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ theme. They were bluegrass and we were 180 degrees from bluegrass.”

“The Earl Scruggs gig was in front of this flannel-shirt kind of crowd,” says Joey D’Amico, Crack’s drummer. “We were doing ‘Sea Epic’ or something and this guy at a table full of maybe 10 or 15 people starts counting down with his fingers — three, two, one and they all scream, ‘You suck!’” … They were throwing bread heels and bottles and I think some fruit.”

It was a demoralizing experience for a band that, in 1975, had its first album hailed by Rolling Stone as the magazine’s debut album of the year. Crack The Sky formed in West Virginia, at Weirton along the Ohio River, but it became forever identified with Baltimore after an experience not unlike one depicted in the Coen Brothers’ film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”

In that epic set in Depression-era Mississippi, three fugitives from a chain gang make some quick cash by presenting themselves, along with a skilled guitarist, as the Soggy Bottom Boys. They record “Man of Constant Sorrow” at a rural radio station, then continue their odyssey. Meanwhile, their song becomes a radio hit throughout the Delta — something the four men do not realize until they sneak on stage to perform at a political rally. The crowd goes wild for the Soggy Bottom Boys.

Something like this happened to Crack The Sky in 1976. And it’s a great story, told in oral history form, in a new book, “All Things Crack,” by longtime fan Tyson Koska and published by Baltimore-based BrickHouse Books.

While Rolling Stone praised the band’s debut album, Crack The Sky did not really benefit from that acclaim because the album’s producers were new to the promotion and distribution of records.

It was the 1970s, a decade before compact discs and 25 years before iTunes. It was a boom time for the record industry; Fleetwood Mac, Jefferson Starship, Boston and other bands sold millions of albums.

Not so Crack The Sky.

The company behind its first label could not deliver records to record stores. It could not even deliver records to record-signing events. Airplay on radio stations was good, but it did not turn into sales.

Except, for some reason, in Baltimore.

“There were plenty of records available in Baltimore apparently,” says Crack guitarist Jim Griffiths. “In other places people went to stores and they didn’t have it. Baltimore had them and people bought them.”

Radio stations of the time — WKTK-FM (105.7) and WAYE (860 AM) — had a lot to do with that. Chris Emry, at WAYE for the start of his long radio career, believes he might have been the first DJ to give Crack The Sky air time. Both stations played three or four cuts off the debut album, and the band caught fire among listeners in the Baltimore region.

This was unknown to the band as it headed for Maryland on its dismal tour of country bars and discos. “We get down to Baltimore and we really didn’t know what to expect,” Griffiths says.

On the night of March 18, 1976, the band was expected at the bygone Four Corners Inn, at Jarrettsville Pike and Paper Mill Road in Jacksonville, Baltimore County. As band members arrived, they were startled by the quality of the warmup act, Sky King. “I couldn’t believe those guys were opening and we were headlining,” says Witkowski. “I was intimidated.”

As Koska’s book tells it, the crowd’s reaction to Sky King was mild and polite, nothing more. “It made me real nervous,” says Joe Macre, Crack’s bass player. “They had chops. They were killin’ it.”

But the customers had not come for Sky King. They had come for Crack The Sky.

“We started to walk on stage and got a standing ovation before one note,” Witkowski recalls.

“They knew our music, enthusiastically,” says Griffiths. “It never happened before that night, and it was the most amazing feeling of pure excitement.”

“We went in thinking it was just another gig, and afterwards I let myself get excited,” says John Palumbo, the band’s songwriter and lead vocalist. “People knew the music and it knocked me out how they responded.”

“We were rock stars all of a sudden,” says Witkowski. “They ended up booking us for three more nights, four shows in all, each one sold out.”

The rest is rock history, and a lasting legend around Baltimore.