A nineteen hour tape of an entire day’s radio broadcast of WJSV in Washington DC is available via Hoopla. The day is September 21, 1939, a day in which Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech to congress asking it to amend the Neutrality Act so he could aid the allies as World War II had begun.
I saw Bob and Ray on YouTube on the David Letterman show the other day and I found myself waiting for the funny parts, thinking “when is the joke going to finally happen”? I was chuckling and twittering as if this was already funny, that delicious moment of becoming ready to laugh out loud. I […]
Marian McPartland died at 95 this week. She was a terrific piano player until the end; more importantly she pioneered and miraculously maintained – for four decades! – a special, wonderful radio program – “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz”. The format was simple yet unique: she brought another musician into the studio, and had combined duets/interviews/conversations with them, gracefully moving […]
![Recreating the game in the studio [http://www.modestoradiomuseum.org/recreations.html]](https://www.radiosurvivor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/bbrecreations-250x125.jpg "Better than reality, more than make believe: radio’s re-creation of baseball")
In 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants baseball teams simultaneously left New York, the Dodgers to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. I was 10 years old. I loved the Dodgers more than anything in the world. I carried my large pre-transistor radio with me wherever I went so I […]
A birthday present from my best friend, a ‘portable’ radio – the Eton Microlink FR160 Solar-powered radio, with emergency crank power and an American Red Cross sticker of approval – arrived in my life, six weeks ago and has become dear to me. Astonishingly I have found myself listening, more and more, even though I […]
NPR asked its jazz listeners to rate their favorite songs, and gleaned from those responses a list of the top ten Jazz songs of all time[1]. What is interesting about the lists is not that they can establish what is “best,” whatever that might mean, or what is most popular (sales records, etcetera, show that). Looking at […]
Susie Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s lover in the early sixties, died last month, and NPR recently played an excerpt from a 2008 interview with her. I was very moved by the interview, and felt that it gave me a startling and fresh perspective on an important part of Dylan’s early work—his love (and hate) songs, and […]
If you think the above title is long, here’s the one I suggested to Radio Survivor’s editors: Dr. Michael LeNoir tries to have an intelligent discussion of Health Reform on the KPFA airwaves, and is mercilessly pummeled: A Case Study of the Left’s vilification of Obama and its dismissal of Partial Reforms Last week, respected […]
I don’t listen to the radio much anymore, because there’s nothing on that I can count on either enjoying or finding interesting. And so far as the Internet can create your own channel services, like Pandora or Slacker, they seem to me oddly impersonal and somehow too predictable. But now I’ve found Shirley and Spinoza […]
