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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: Static
Episode 10
Sunday, 27 September, 2026
Get in touch!At the start, radio was like the Wild West. Anyone could get on the air, and it was all fair game: preachers, farmers, a quack broadcasting from Mexico. But that was before the networks moved in, before the payola hearings took the records out of the DJs' hands, and ultimately before a single law in 1996 sold the dial to a few corporations. Signalis the story of American radio's hundred-year fight between the people who wanted to say something and the people who wanted to sell something. Because the good guys win in the end, free voices keep getting through anyway.Last time: Signal Episode One, “Hello, World,” covered radio’s first three decades. We listened in as a man on a Pittsburgh rooftop in 1920, read election returns into a microphone without a clue as to whether anyone was listening. In just three short years from that random starting place, there were 556 stations. In the beginning, Boy Scouts built crystal sets. Families gave the radio the best spot in the living room. Farm wives in the Depression found company in it, and FDR comforted a nation in it. For a brief, chaotic window, anyone could get on the air: preachers, poultry farmers, Pedro González speaking Spanish to Los Angeles, and a goat-gland doctor blasting half a million watts from across the Mexican border, where a six-year-old Johnny Cash heard the Carter Family for the first time. Then NBC and CBS moved in and turned all that noise into a business.Radio was built on the fact that people would crave a voice they trust.Then television showed up and took the business away.Now: This is Episode Two and its about what happened in the empty room TV left behind. The big stars packed their bags and left: Jack Benny, Bob Hope, the Lone Ranger all headed for that little box with the fishbowl screen. Meantime, a transmitter, a microphone, and a stack of records were left to hold down the fort. That turned out to be enough. It actually birthed the DJ. Episode two is also the tragic story of Edwin Armstrong, who invented FM radio and was destroyed by the company that should have made him famous. So much for gratitude and fair dealing. And this is also the story of WDIA in Memphis, where Nat D. Williams reached one in ten Black Americans and B.B. King sang jingles. This was also the open range prowled by wildman Wolfman Jack, howling across the border at 250,000 watts. Look again and its also the story of payola hearings: Alan Freed lost everything, Dick Clark lost nothing, and anyone paying attention could see why.My episode two guest is Bruce Warren, who has spent more than 35 years at WXPN Philadelphia, most recently as Assistant General Manager for Programming and Executive Producer of NPR's World Cafe. He’s living proof that some vestiges of the 1950s still remain. The listener-supported model that a pacifist invented in Berkeley, CA in 1949 is the same one that pays NPR station bills. The promotion game that brought down Alan Freed still happens to a lesser extent; these days its concert tickets now instead of cash. And the formatted, playlist-driven radio the payola hearings created leads straight to today, where one voice-tracked DJ can "host" six cities at once. Turn it up. The static’s the good part.Did you miss the first episode - Signal: Hello World? No problem! It's available here on your favorite streaming platform or on the American Song website. Check it out - you won't want to miss it!Get in touch: I'd love to hear from you! Find American Song on Substack.
