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American SongAuthor: Joe Hines
America was meant to be a light on the hill a place others looked to when they needed to find their own way forward.If America has ever truly been that light, it came from its music. From the people who suffered the most and somehow still found something worth singing about.From colonial taverns to protest marches in the Eastern Bloc, from gospel churches to a ghetto in Soweto, American rhythms helped people band together, speak truth, and refuse to quit. Our songs became the world's songs not because we exported them, but because people who needed hope reached out and claimed them as their own.American Song tells the stories of the artists who made the music and the people who were moved by it. One era at a time. One genre, one band, one song at a time. Music that started by campfires, in cotton fields, in churches and juke joints and moved out into the world to become something larger than any one nation could contain.This is American Song. Language: en-us Genres: Music, Music History, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Signal: Freeform Radio Breaks the Rules and Makes History
Episode 12
Monday, 2 November, 2026
Get in touch!Catching You UpNew to the series? Here’s where we are. Episode One was the birth of American radio: a box in the living room that started talking in the 1920s and became the most intimate machine Americans had ever owned. Episode Two was the complicated part. Edwin Armstrong invented FM and RCA buried it. Television took radio’s stars. Black radio, the disc jockey, and rock and roll moved into the empty rooms, and the payola hearings made sure the independent DJs paid for it. You don’t need either episode to follow this one, but they’re both in the feed, and they’re both pretty good, if I say so myself. And I do.Moving the Story ForwardIn April 1967, a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound former Top 40 star named Tom Donahue sat down at a San Francisco radio station so broke its phone had been disconnected. He put on a record and let it play all the way through. Then he put on another one. Nobody had told him he couldn’t.That’s how freeform FM started, more or less. Larry Miller, the overnight man, would like you to know he’d been doing it for two months already.This is Part One of the story. It’s about the government order that accidentally emptied the FM dial, and the people who walked in and started playing whatever they wanted. Listeners built antennas out of coat hangers. The staff went on strike at three in the morning, on the air, and the bands came down to play in the street. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh dropped by the studio with a stack of records and called their own debut album a turd. On a commercial radio station.You’ll hear the real thing: Tom Donahue on KMPX in 1967, Scott Muni and Alison Steele, the Nightbird, on WNEW-FM in New York, and Michael Tearson on WMMR in Philadelphia, recruiting doctors for a free clinic in the middle of his overnight shift. Two guests who were there tell it from both sides of the glass. Brad Kyle was a nineteen-year-old DJ in Houston who once phased two copies of a KISS album by hand to make a car crash sound better. Bruce Warren was a kid in Philadelphia with his radio tuned to WMMR, who grew up to help build World Cafe.For a few years, a person with a stack of records and an opinion could put a seventeen-minute song on the radio and nobody got fired. This is the story of those years. Part Two is about who paid for them.
