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The term “Old Time Radio” refers to the amusement programs that were broadcast to the public from the early 1920s to the early 1960s. In the beginning, most radio programs emulated the vaudeville acts that were the mainstay of public amusement before radio. Comics and singers ruled the airwaves! Best of all, you no longer had to leave your home to receive pleasure from their talents! Eventually, however, audiences matured and other types of programs were added to the radio schedule. Drama series became exceedingly popular including shows regarding doctors, soap operas, and even movie scripts that were adapted for radio. Action series brought cops, robbers, private detectives, and westerns into the home! Fantasy series thrilled audiences with well known characters including Superman and the Green Hornet! Horror fans got their share of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Those who craved science fiction got their weekly craving for tales of the future, space travel, and exploration of the unknown. Game shows like “You Bet Your Life” gave the intermediate person an escape from each day life!
The firstborn mercantile radio station in the U.S. (KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) begun occasional broadcasting in 1920. By 1922, the original regularly broadcast old time radio shows had begun. Up until the late 1920s, musical programs were most usual with shows highlighting opera, huge bands, jazz, classical, and usual music.
In the 1930s, the initial daytime series appeared featuring romance and other subject matter that appealed to the typical American housewife. Most of those programs were sponsored by soap merchandise and that’s where the term “Soap Opera” originated. Radio shows like “The Cisco Kid” and “Captain Midnight” were broadcast in the afternoons for the amusement of young people as they returned home from school. Comedy series begun to appear including the “George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” and the “Jack Benny Show” which both started out in 1932. “Amos ‘N Andy” in truth hit the airwaves in 1928! Then in the early 1940s, a almost never-ending list of comedy programs joined those pioneers and comedy shows became the most prolific genre through the end of Old Time Radio.
By 1947, 82% of persons in the U.S. listened to the radio on a regular basis. The Old Time Radio shows were not like most audio books of today where someone with a pleasant voice reads you a book. Old Time Radio shows were merchandise just like the television programs of today. There were sound effects, multiple actors in multiple roles, and primary rate scripts! Many people today are shocked at how agreeably diverting they may be when they listen their firstborn Old Time Radio program. The lack of video may genuinely be a plus! Your mind oftentimes imagines the characters and scenery much better than seeing those things on a television screen.
Most Old Time Radio Shows were aired live up until the late 1940s. Therefore, the most standard shows had to be performed twice due to the time divergence amid the east coast and the west coast. Most of those programs are lost to us today as they were in general not recorded. There are exclusions where and advertiser wanted copies of their programs or for numerous programs that aired in syndication. Thankfully, by the early 1950s, a heap of programs were broadcast live on the east coast and recorded for later broadcast on the west coast. A astoundingly big number of those recordings are still in existence today thanks, mostly, to collector/hobbyists who acquired them through the years. Due to their age, most of those are available free of charge on the web or at very low cost on cd (in mp3 format) from a lot of vendors.
In the mid 1950s TV was getting the king of amusement and radio was transforming into a largely musical format. There were shows, however, that continued for a few more years and a lot of of them even aired at the same time as a TV version of the same program.
Radio Voices American Broadcasting 1922 1952
In Radio Voices, Michele Hilmes looks at the way radio programming influenced and was influenced by the United States of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, tracing the history of the medium from it is earliest years through the advent of television.
From Publishers WeeklyDon’t suppose a sentimental traveling through radio’s Golden Age in Hilmes’s well-researched study. Jack Benny, Orson Welles and the soaps are all here, in passing, but the agenda is severe sociology: the dialectics of American culture as reflected in this “lost” medium. Hilmes presents radio as an ongoing battle to initial define, then exploit, a altering America by a shifting cast of power brokers. It didn’t take long for the 1920s invention to be wrested from the amateurs by the moguls of commerce: networks, sponsors and, most powerfully, ad agencies. Hilmes then examines their attempts to fetch into a huge new “imagined community” all the tensions of a very diverse society, as when racial stereotypes are spun into a narrative that transfixes white America in Amos ‘n’ Andy. Women are ghettoized to the soaps and daytime programming while at night Hollywood voices try both highbrow and lowbrow bait in comedy/variety and drama. WWII further strains the disenfranchised members of radio’s utopia, before TV inherits the whole mess. Hilmes, who teaches communication arts at the University of Wisconsin and is the author of Hollywood and Broadcasting, backs up her theses with fascinatingly cynical memos from the incunabula of J. Walter Thompson and NBC, as well as remarks from an impressive chorus of social scientists. Her writing, alas, suffers from too a lot of phrases like “naturalizing strategic cultural hierarchies behind the screen of gender destruction.” This must not deflect readers, however, who are more than willing to sacrifice radio’s golden Oz to meet the often times forgotten men and women working the levers behind the curtain.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus ReviewsAn often times evocative study of the sociological affect of the Golden Age of radio. Hilmes (Communication Arts/Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) notes that the years in which radio was the important source of American mass amusement and data have been closely wholly forgotten by the public and ignored by academics. She believes that radio had just as much of an affect on the way we live as the many times studied media of film and television, and her study is an venture to redress this imbalance. Not attempting a finish history, Hilmes has cast the book as a series of interlocking but basically self-contained essays on such subjects as the radio images of immigrants (Rise of the Goldbergs, etc.), blacks (Amos ‘n’ Andy), and women (the evolution of daytime programming, etc.). This is intriguing material and Hilmes, an admitted radio buff, appears unambiguously suitable to present it. However, Radio Voices is uneasily balanced amongst the more casual voice of frequent history, with it is agreeably diverting anecdotes and special importance and significance on bright personalities, and a more stringent scholarly tone, with it is heavy footnoting of origins and extensive, now and again ponderous analysis. The more scholarly voice often wins out, and this is unfortunate, because Hilmes is at her best when plainly telling the lively stories of such forgotten favorites as Gertrude Berg and Mary Margaret McBride. If her often perceptive analyses were couched in the same easy tone, she might have had a book that would appeal to a wider audience than she attempts to reach. There is much to admire here, but pop culture buffs may wish that Hilmes could break her academic chains and speak as directly as the radio voices she so distinctly loves. (19 photos, 3 illustrations, not seen) — Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review…the book is valuable for placing radio within a cultural and historical framework. — The New York Times Book Review, Ruth Bayard Smith
Radio Voices American Broadcasting 1922 1952 Picture
Radio Voices American Broadcasting 1922 1952 Pic
Radio Voices American Broadcasting 1922 1952 Image
Radio Voices American Broadcasting 1922 1952 Photo
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9 of 11 humans found the following review helpful.
 Decent History of early Radio
By Christopher J. Martin
Radio Voices is a decent look at radio from the early 1900s to 1952, though Hilmes largely skirts any discussion of radio’s decline after 1945.
She amply discusses the effects of early programs such as Amos ‘n Andy which were based on minstrel shows. This discussion and the racial reasons behind them is rather interesting.
However, I think the book at galore points turns from an interesting discussion into a polemic, and loses it is way. She discusses the “ghettoization” of women programs to the daytime schedule. I think this actually disrespects women listeners of the 1920s and 30s. Yes, a heap of of them were at home and not out working like a lot of men, but Hilmes discusses this topic in a tone that makes it sound like the daytime schedule was “second rate” when in fact it’s the women who make the purchasing selections for most households, not the men who’d be listening more at night. The audience may have been littler for the duration of the day than at night, but it doesn’t mean it’s less indispensable and surely shouldn’t be referred to as “ghettoization”.
Also she discusses in condesending tones the use of radio by the government and other interests to publicize America’s intervention in World War II. Like a great deal of post-Vietnam academics, it’s evident she likely falsely believes we will have to have stayed out of that war. It’s in truth a shame she strays into a polemic on a great deal of of these topics. Otherwise, it would have been a outstanding book.
3 of 4 persons found the following review helpful.
 A fun… and perceptive historical look at radio
By DJ Joe Sixpack
An outstanding, if more or less academic, homage to the glory days of live radio. Hilmes is both a fan of the medium and a critic of it is development, paying particular attention to radio’s role in shaping American national identity. The presentment of women and respective ethnic groups is one of her main concerns, but Hilmes isn’t a mere PC grind; she also explores the subtle differences in meaning or opinion or attitude of supposed stereotypes, analyzing the degree to which these characterizations both shaped and reflected the world around them. It’s arousing and attention holding to read an account of a seemingly “dead” medium… She does a great occupation capturing the flavor of the times, even altho most of us will never be competent to listen the shows she mentions. Hilmes draws upon assorted major media libraries, as well as spacious governmental and academic archives, mixing bureaucratic, sociological and pop cultural perspectives. Of peculiar interest to readers in the present day, where multinational conglomerates duke it out over the vanishing frontier of post-dotcom economy, and the FCC and Congress have sharply curtailed freedom of expression (under the guise of protecting intellectual property), is the older, earlier story of how the US government and the budding broadcast industry squelched the amatuer broadcasters of the ‘teens and ’20s. In galore ways it’s a side note to Himes’ wider social concerns, but it couldn’t be more timely. Recommended reading!
0 of 0 humans found the following review helpful.
 A Must Read
By Sol A. Factor
Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-152 is a will have to read for those who wish to learn in regards to this indispensable amount of time in our history. It is an splendid book for those who do not forget those terrifi days, and for those who want to learn what their parents or grandparents were talking about!
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