Seems Radio is Here to Stay — Norman Corwin, Columbia Workshop, CBS 1939

Norman Corwin has been called the poet laureate of radio. He wrote some of the most widely-acclaimed radio plays on American air during World War II, including “We Hold These Truths” and “On a Note of Triumph.” He was later one of the first American producers to use actuality tape in radio documentaries. And he lived into our own time, influencing many public radio producers. Corwin got a Lifetime Achievement Award from Third Coast International Audio Festival in 2005, when he was 95 years old. He died in 2011.

All that, of course, was still in Corwin’s future in 1939. Still in his late 20s, he signed up to write 26 original radio plays in 26 weeks for the Columbia Workshop program. Corwin called this love letter to radio an “animated essay." He also says he wrote the last, powerful section of the script during a break in rehearsal — so just hours before it first aired.

We have been evacuated — Olive Shapley, BBC Manchester, 1939

Olive Shapley was a groundbreaking radio documentary producer who worked in Manchester, England beginning in the 1930s. When she started, almost all BBC radio was scripted and presented live in studio. But in the late 1930s, the Manchester studio got a mobile recording van— a retrofitted furniture van with some engineers inside who could record on a kind of early record called a directly cut disc that allowed immediate playback (see photo above).

Olive was thrilled with this development and went all over Manchester making documentaries about regular working people in their homes, at shops, on the street and at work.  In an interview aired many years later on the BBC, she said, “I wanted to get real people talking about their lives. You can never get that in a studio, because this was an unnatural environment. You had to go into people’s homes..the cabs of their lorries, wherever it was…I had always wanted to do documentary, and suddenly you could do it. That was exciting.”

Shapley went on to make several seminal documentaries that are some of the earliest examples of BBC stories featuring the voices of working class people on the air. This is one of her surviving broadcasts from September 10, 1939, and it features Shapley talking with children who had just been evacuated from London and other cities in the south, and with the Mancunian mothers who took them in.  

Revolt of the Worms — Arch Oboler, CBS, 1942

Arch Oboler was a brilliant radio writer and director in the sci-fi/horror vein. “Revolt of the Worms” was part of his late-night showcase Lights Out! It features a mono-maniacal scientist who isolates himself on a mountaintop with his poor wife, Clare. The scientist is trying to grow the world’s biggest rose as the rest of the world is engulfed by war. His horticultural experiment goes badly awry. You can hear Oboler's radiophonic genius throughout this piece, which he also directed — and keep in mind, it was all produced live in the studio. (Special thanks to producer extraordinaire Sarah Montague for suggesting this drama for our playlist.)

The Rime of the Ancient Dodger — Richard Durham, WMAQ, 1948

Richard Durham’s award-winning Destination Freedom weekly radio series was broadcast every Sunday morning from June 1948 to August 1950 on Chicago’s NBC affiliate, WMAQ. This episode is just one example of Durham’s bold and lyrically creative approach to aural storytelling about contemporary and historic Black American heroes and heroines who each, in their own ways, fought for freedom, justice and equality.

“The Rime of the Ancient Dodger” aired on November 21, 1948, and it was narrated, in rhyme, by a mystical character Durham created— an all-knowing Dodgers’ fan named Sammy the Whammy. Sammy used his “whammy” skills to guide listeners through the story of Jackie Robinson, the gifted African American athlete who integrated baseball’s all-white major leagues when he was hired to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Future Pulitzer Prize-winning author and radio personality Studs Terkel played Sammy, while talented young actors and Destination Freedom cast regulars Oscar Brown Jr. and Janice Kingslow respectively portrayed Robinson and several of the women in the show. 

Black Radio & Civil Rights — Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, Radio Smithsonian/PRI

This episode about Black radio’s presence and influence during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, comes from Radio Smithsonian’s Peabody Award-winning 13-part documentary series, Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was. It was produced in 1996 by the Smithsonian Institution’s media production unit and distributed to approximately 300 noncommercial radio stations nationwide by Public Radio International. Black Radio was redistributed by the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) in 2021 – the series’ 25th anniversary year. Grammy Award-winning singer Lou Rawls narrated the series, and it featured the insights of radio announcers and reporters, owners and managers, and listeners and historians, along with the music and sounds of the times.

This episode features the comments of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as the story of a disc jockey who helped get the word out about anti-discrimination protests by children in Birmingham, Alabama.

Sound Portrait of New York — Tony Schwartz, WNYC

Tony Schwartz. Schwartz was born in 1923. He was an American sound recordist, archivist and radio broadcaster. He produced a weekly program on WNYC called Adventures in Sound that aired from the 1950s to 1976. Sometime in the 1940s, Schwartz had added a shoulder strap to a bulky, early commercial tape recorder. This allowed him to haul the recorder around the city, recording sound wherever he was, which he’d then edit into short documentaries and “sound portraits” like this one. In addition to countless field recordings of mid-century NYC, Schwartz made several recordings of children and created experimental works using editing to demonstrate the evolution of a single voice over time, including Nancy Grows Up, a time-lapse audio portrait of his niece recorded over nine years.

Selected bibliography and recommendations for further reading/listening HERE