Radio After The Golden Age

The golden age of radio is often recalled as a time when the medium unified the nation, when families gathered around the radios in homes across the country to listen to live, commercially sponsored network broadcasts. In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo revises our understanding of radio’s past by revealing the hidden histories of production, distribution, and reception practices during this era, which extended from the 1920s into the 1950s. Russo brings to light a tiered broadcasting system with intermingling but distinct national, regional, and local programming forms, sponsorship patterns, and methods of program distribution. Examining a wide range of practices, including regional networking, sound-on-disc transcription, the use of station representatives, spot advertising, and programming aimed at homes with several radios, he not only recasts our understanding of the relationship between national networks and local stations but also charts the development of new ways of listening—often distractedly rather than attentively—that set the stage for radio in the second half of the twentieth century.

What became of radio after its Golden Age ended about 1960? Not long ago Arbitron found that almost 93 percent of Americans age 12 and older are regular radio listeners, a higher percentage than those turning to television, magazines, newspapers, or the Internet. But the sounds they hear now barely resemble those of radio’s heyday when it had little competition as a mass entertainment and information source. Much has transpired in the past fifty-plus years: a proliferation of disc jockeys, narrowcasting, the FM band, satellites, automation, talk, ethnicity, media empires, Internet streaming and gadgets galore... Deregulation, payola, HD radio, pirate radio, the fall of transcontinental networks, the rise of local stations, conglomerate ownership, and radio’s future landscape are examined in detail. Radio has lost a bit of influence yet it continues to inspire stunning innovations.

What became of radio after its Golden Age ended about 1960? Not long ago Arbitron found that almost 93 percent of Americans age 12 and older are regular radio listeners, a higher percentage than those turning to television, magazines, newspapers, or the Internet. But the sounds they hear now barely resemble those of radio's heyday when it had little competition as a mass entertainment and information source. Much has transpired in the past fifty-plus years: a proliferation of disc jockeys, narrowcasting, the FM band, satellites, automation, talk, ethnicity, media empires, Internet streaming and gadgets galore... Deregulation, payola, HD radio, pirate radio, the fall of transcontinental networks, the rise of local stations, conglomerate ownership, and radio's future landscape are examined in detail. Radio has lost a bit of influence yet it continues to inspire stunning innovations.

The king of radio comedy from the Great Depression through the early 1950s, Jack Benny was one of the most influential entertainers in twentieth-century America. A master of comic timing and an innovative producer, Benny, with his radio writers, developed a weekly situation comedy to meet radio’s endless need for new material, at the same time integrating advertising into the show’s humor. Through the character of the vain, cheap everyman, Benny created a fall guy, whose frustrated struggles with his employees addressed midcentury America’s concerns with race, gender, commercialism, and sexual identity. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley contextualizes her analysis of Jack Benny and his entourage with thoughtful insight into the intersections of competing entertainment industries and provides plenty of evidence that transmedia stardom, branded entertainment, and virality are not new phenomena but current iterations of key aspects in American commercial cultural history.

In The Jewish Hour, author Michael Mandel delves into the pages of a Yiddish newspaper, the Kanader Nayes, to learn about his late father's Yiddish radio show and the world of the Jewish immigrants who lived in Toronto from the 1930s through the 1950s. Adds significantly to our knowledge of Toronto's Jewish history. Yiddish song lyrics included.