This is a pretty nutty find. It’s close to six hours of a normal broadcast day on a local Washington D.C. radio station, WJSV, on September 21, 1939. In other words, if you were a housewife sitting around your house and put your radio on in the background and left it on for hours while you did the wash, scrubbed the kitchen floor, polished the silver and in general acted subservient, this is what would be on in the background. There’s a 6:00 AM sign on, Arthur Godfrey as your morning host, various soap operas, music etc. Basically it’s a glimpse into the banality of the past–which is in some ways a lot more evocative and informative then simply seeing the high points of history. Now, clearly nobody reading this is going to put this thing on and listen to it for five plus hours. What I’m doing, though, is letting it play in the background all afternoon, not really listening to it and yet letting it fill the empty space of the ambient daytime atmosphere–much as that forgotten housewife did on the morning of September 21, 1939…
January 21, 2025
4 Responses
“The music is recorded.” A friend asked me once how old I was when I discovered/realized that music on the radio was not being performed live with the band/singer in the room at the time you were listening to it. It’s interesting here that they make a note each time that the music is not live each time they play something. They’d stopped doing by the time I was alive otherwise I guess I would have always known it wasn’t live. Also this is interesting as the war in France seems to be unfolding but France hasn’t fallen yet. Germany had started to invade on September 3rd.
Let me correct myself Germany hadn’t invaded France yet but there was some fighting. It’s interesting because this minor news item they read, would of course completely take over the news and the world soon enough and for years to come. The quiet day of radio listening would become more and more alarming.
The news break is indeed fascinating and I should have pointed it out in the body of my post. Yes, France is still fighting…though given the way things went shortly after this broadcast it makes the news break especially sad. As for the live music, the big musicians strike–the AF of M–that would be underway a couple of years from this date had, as its centerpiece objection, the practice of records to be played on the air. They contended that this deprived musicians of the jobs of performing live. For more info on the whole strike thing and how it accidentally affected music history in a positive way (by forcing big labels to keep negotiating while little ones popped up and recorded unknown jazz/ bebop players whose music changed the popular sound) read my friend Marc Myers book “Why Jazz Happened.”