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Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio
In Voice Over, a celebration and history, William Barlow explores the landscape of black radio from the early days - when the white public accepted the black-face buffoonery of The Amos and Andy Show and Beulah as a fair depiction of African American life - to the rise of personality jocks and the contemporary scene of corporate buyouts and uncertain fate.
- GenresMusic
334 pages, Paperback
First published December 18, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 20, 2019
For this book, I turn back to the lightning round of interesting bits:
Chapter 13 is about the lack of black ownership. I wonder if a quick change wasn’t possible because kids at that time didn’t want to be owners.
Random thought: Horatio Alger is the symbol of the self-made man that the American Dream holds up like Simba. I wonder what it says about The Dream if kids don’t know who he is?
The advent of Top 40 radio was because radio stations wanted the money their DJs were getting from Payola (a scheme where DJs would get paid to play an artist). No longer would the DJs get the money or even have control over what they played. The owners used science to prove their point p. 192
Side Note: The first sit-in happened at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, NC on 2/1/1960
Chapter 10 shows how social media’s role in organizing protests were taken from the tradition created by black DJs. They’d play a song to start and stop a protest.
They also gave leaders like MLK airtime to address the people.
Cab Calloway’s name pops up quite a bit as the host of variety shows and such. I only know him from The Blues Brothers.
Chapter 13 is about the lack of black ownership. I wonder if a quick change wasn’t possible because kids at that time didn’t want to be owners.
Random thought: Horatio Alger is the symbol of the self-made man that the American Dream holds up like Simba. I wonder what it says about The Dream if kids don’t know who he is?
The advent of Top 40 radio was because radio stations wanted the money their DJs were getting from Payola (a scheme where DJs would get paid to play an artist). No longer would the DJs get the money or even have control over what they played. The owners used science to prove their point p. 192
Side Note: The first sit-in happened at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, NC on 2/1/1960
Chapter 10 shows how social media’s role in organizing protests were taken from the tradition created by black DJs. They’d play a song to start and stop a protest.
They also gave leaders like MLK airtime to address the people.
Cab Calloway’s name pops up quite a bit as the host of variety shows and such. I only know him from The Blues Brothers.
March 29, 2021
So interesting! Want to really read.
Page 204: “Throughout the country, African American DJs were instrumental in popularizing the new soul music genre, and they were responsible for setting up the radio “grapevine“ on which civil rights information circulated in the black community. As a result, soul music became a race-coded soundtrack for the assault on Jim Crow, and black appeal radio became an important means of spreading the civil rights message...”
Page 204: “Throughout the country, African American DJs were instrumental in popularizing the new soul music genre, and they were responsible for setting up the radio “grapevine“ on which civil rights information circulated in the black community. As a result, soul music became a race-coded soundtrack for the assault on Jim Crow, and black appeal radio became an important means of spreading the civil rights message...”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews