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    New Orleans Radio
    New Orleans Radio
    New Orleans Radio
    Ebook230 pages39 minutes

    New Orleans Radio

    By Dominic Massa

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    About this ebook

    From humble beginnings in a physics lab on the campus of Loyola University came the sounds of the first radio station in the lower Mississippi River Valley when WWL Radio signed on in 1922. The little station would grow into a national powerhouse, with its morning Dawnbusters show and nightly broadcasts from the Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. The city s second oldest station, WSMB, with studios in the Maison Blanche Building, developed its own cast of favorites, including Nut and Jeff. Later, in the city known as the birthplace of jazz, radio played a key role in popularizing early rock and roll. Disc jockeys at leading stations WTIX and WNOE helped develop the Crescent City sound, along with local personalities with colorful names like Poppa Stoppa, Jack the Cat, and Dr. Daddy-O.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 20, 2014
    ISBN9781439647905
    New Orleans Radio
    Author

    Dominic Massa

    Author Dominic Massa is a native of the New Orleans area who works as the executive producer and special projects director at WWL-TV. A past president of the Press Club of New Orleans, he has produced two programs on local television history for the city’s PBS affiliate, WYES-TV: New Orleans TV: The Golden Age and Stay Tuned: New Orleans’ Classic TV Commercials.

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      Book preview

      New Orleans Radio - Dominic Massa

      project.

      INTRODUCTION

      Guglielmo Marconi’s invention may be well over 125 years old, but radio remains one of the world’s most transient businesses. In radio broadcasting, announcers come and go, disc jockeys and talk-show hosts are easily replaced, formats change, and stations are sold. So how is it that some of the best-known names in New Orleans radio—Henry Dupre, Pinky Vidacovich, Vernon Winslow, Jill Jackson, Clarence Hamann, Larry McKinley, Robert Mitchell, and Bob Walker, to name but a few—belong to people who spent several decades firmly anchored in this town and became beloved personalities? As Louis Armstrong once said when asked to define jazz, if you have to ask, you will never know.

      New Orleans is a city like few others, so it stands to reason that, while its radio history in some ways mirrors that of other cities, it also has its own flair. The city played a pivotal role in many aspects of American broadcasting history, having given birth to the first radio station in the lower Mississippi River Valley, WWL, which signed on the air in 1922, the outgrowth of physics experiments and wireless radio classes at Loyola University. The early years were experimental, innovative and mostly formless, as one writer explained in a history of WWL’s early years. It was only through the interest and dedication of Jesuit priests, professors, and students that WWL grew from its early, humble beginnings into a national treasure.

      WDSU, which became a broadcasting powerhouse when it introduced the city’s first television station, followed WWL with its own radio station, though it would take several more years to develop. By 1925, the city had its first commercial station, WSMB, which, unlike the six other radio stations on the air by that time, was designed as the first self-supporting broadcast business. Its facilities on the 13th floor of the Maison Blanche Building on Canal Street were top-of-the-line, so much so that when station legends Nut and Jeff were broadcasting more than 50 years later at the height of their fame in the 1970s, they were sitting in those very same studios.

      Nut and Jeff, in real life Roy Roberts and Jeff Hug, were two of the local radio personalities who became icons by simply doing what they did best—talking and being New Orleanians. The same goes for WSMB night owl Larry Regan and midday talker Keith Rush, who both became enormously popular on WSMB just by talking the talk before there was a talk radio format to emulate. On WWL, Irvine Pinky Vidacovich knew his Dawnbusters audience and the Louisiana spirit so well that he wrote more than 30 songs employing Cajun themes and dialect. His music and his comedy (more than 4,000 skits, by one estimate) were popular locally and nationally. WWL’s Blue Room supper club broadcasts from the Roosevelt Hotel (and, later, Charlie Douglas’s Road Gang trucker shows) were carried by the station’s 50,000-watt, clear-channel signal to listeners worldwide.

      By the late 1940s, musical styles and sounds were changing, and New Orleans radio stations and broadcasters were part of that change. Despite the reality of segregation, which delayed his own on-air debut, Vernon Doctor Daddy-O Winslow, as the city’s first African American disc jockey, was encouraging change by playing the music that inspired a New Orleans rhythm and coaching a generation of broadcasters who played a key part in developing the early rhythm and blues sounds that became rock ’n’ roll. Without Dr. Daddy-O, there would be no Okey Dokey Smith, no Jack the Cat Elliott, and certainly no Poppa Stoppa, the most famous and imitated of them all: Clarence Hamann.

      By the 1950s and 1960s, as the list of New Orleans stations grew, when it came to music, it was really all about two: WNOE and WTIX. The two stations engaged in a spirited battle for listeners, primarily baby boomers who were growing into teenagers. The young audience’s musical tastes ran the gamut, and with the freedom to play local musicians’ songs as well as national hits, the DJs of that era helped open new horizons. For better or for worse, the format for Top 40 radio took its baby steps here in New Orleans at WTIX, with the format developed by owner Todd Storz. During the 1960s, the sounds of the Crescent City came from voices still familiar today: Buzz Bennett, Ted Green, Jim Stewart, Hugh Dillard, Dan Diamond, C.C. Courtney, Lou Kirby, Skinny Tommy Cheney, The Real Robert Mitchell, The Oldie King Bob Walker (who spent more than 40 years in radio before retiring), and Bobby Reno, who is still at it.

      While some of those broadcast legends are still with us, many are not. Some have faded into memory, with no photograph left by which to remember them. That means it is impossible for a work like this to chronicle all of the comings and goings on the radio dial over the past 90 or so years in New Orleans. Still, from Dawnbusters to Daddy-O, from Poppa Stoppa to Scoot, Mama Lou to Maury Magill, and Henry Dupre to Captain Humble, there are thankfully many chapters of colorful local history to cover.

      New Orleans had the best radio stations in the world, Bob Dylan wrote in his 2004 autobiography. He shared a more recent memory that is nonetheless just as poignant. He recalled the days in 1989 when he recorded an album in New Orleans and listened to WWOZ. WWOZ was the kind of station I used to listen to late at night growing up, and it brought me back to the trials of my youth and touched the spirit of it. Back then when something was wrong the radio could lay hands on you and you’d be all right.

      The WTIX disc jockeys are

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