Venereal Disease and Country Music

2013-08-05_VD_Goldin_RoyAcuffFor the seventh time, folk singer and songwriter Tom Glazer picks up his guitar, sees the red recording light go on, and sings at the microphone in all sincerity:

Don’t take a chance go see a doctor
Don’t take a chance go get examined
Don’t take a chance go see a doctor now.

Glazer was taking part in an experiment by the Public Health Service, began in the late 1940s, called “VD Radio Project” (the “VD” was a nicer way of saying venereal disease).  He wrote and performed this little song to introduce seven short announcements about venereal disease and the importance of getting seen by a doctor.

VD Radio Project’s goal was to educate the public and dispel taboos about syphilis, gonorrhea, and other venereal diseases. Other than the seven short recordings done by Glazer, the rest of the series consisted of fifteen minute episodes. Some were straight radio dramas, and some were real life stories and voices from those affected by venereal diseases. But the episodes of “VD Radio Project” that had the most impact used a powerful weapon–popular musicians like Tom Glazer, Woody Guthrie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Merle Travis, Roy Acuff, and Hank Williams.

These episodes were typical radio dramas in one sense but were also partly told in verse and sung in ballad. The guest stars functioned as sort of narrators and sort of troubadours. These mixtures of music and drama Erik Barnouw, creator of the series, called “hillbilly operas.” The songs were sometimes reactions to situations, but also were used to move the plot forward. Alan Lomax, a pioneer in collecting and preserving American folk music, was key in creating this style of radio musical drama.

One episode written by Lomax, Looking for Lester, integrated Roy Acuff and His Smokey Mountain Boys into a drama based on a true story. The episode is about Lester, who falls in love with Ann, but sleeps with another girl and contracts syphilis. Or as Roy Acuff put it: “Old Lester was fit to be tied, went to the bar and got fried,” and then, “went on a spree that was a dilly, with a filly named Millie!”

Lester returns to Ann, and the young couple marry.

Sound your “G” chord boys and I’ll tell Lester’s story.

A chord is strummed on a steel string guitar and Roy Acuff and the Smokey Mountain Boys play this tune:

Is there anything nicer in the whole round world my honey
Is there anything nicer in the whole round world My babe.
Is there anything nicer in the whole round world
When a girl loves a boy and a boy loves a girl.
Honey o baby mine.

Lester and Anne got married in May my honey
Lester and Anne got married in May my babe
Lester and Anne got married in May
Life was happy and life was gay
Honey o baby mine.

But, alas, everything is not so happy. Ann gets pregnant and during a checkup with her doctor she finds out that she has syphilis. Lester leaves in anger and shame. Roy Acuff gives the drama a touch of reality by informing the audience that this is about someone he really knows who might be listening. He begs his friend to come back to his wife and their child, and tells him that syphilis can be cured.

J. David Goldin calls this radio play, “Good radio!” And I agree. Especially since it and the other “hillbilly operas” treaded new ground artistically for radio. They combined the popularity of musical celebrities, original song writing and singing, radio drama, real life experiences, elements of radio opera, and medical advice all to an altruistic end.

These musical episodes of “VD Radio Project” are getting attention today for the stars that were in them. The episode with Hank Williams has understandably been given much attention. A researcher in New Hampshire, Fred Bals, is currently writing a book about the series and plans to do research at Marr. We say, “good luck!” to Fred, and hopefully, lots more books will come out of the J. David Goldin Collection!

Troy Cummings, guest contributor

National Women’s History Month

2012-03-08_WomensHistoryMonth_Goldin_we-can-do-itNational Women’s History Month was initially only celebrated for a week during the month of March. In 1987, United States Congress passed a resolution expanding the observance from a week to a month due to the appeals made by the National Women’s History Project (NWHP). In celebration of National Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, I would like to highlight a few of the various radio programs available in the J. David Goldin Collection that feature women.

The collection contains interviews with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Adele Astaire, Marian Anderson, Hildegarde, Ilka Chase, Gertrude Lawrence, (Savings Bond campaign. Prominent women series. Program nos. 7-12), and Jessie Street (A look at Australia. Program no. 42, Women in the United States) just to name a few.

In addition to interviews, the collection also contains dramas, such as the story of well-known suffragist, Susan B. Anthony who was arrested for trying to vote on Nov. 18, 1872 (Lest we forget. Second series, program no. 17), stories about women’s rights (The U.N. story. No. 55, A little bit of justice; U.N. story. #16, Adam’s rib), and stories about how women have contributed and been an integral part of society (Lest we forget. 5th series, program no. 8, A better world for youth; A story for you. Program no. 6, Princess Kartini schools for girls). Besides interviews and dramas you can also find debates with female political figures, music programs featuring a variety of female singers, and much more waiting to be discovered.

Patricia Altamirano, Library Specialist, Special Formats

Good radio

J. David GoldinWhen J. David Goldin visited UMKC in May 2010, I could not pass up the opportunity to speak with him. He has listened to and annotated thousands upon thousands of hours of historical American radio. He has a passion for radio, as he said in our conversation, “I collected the stuff because I like to listen to it.”

There are not many people in the world with his knowledge and exposure to radio. So I decided to ask him the ultimate question:

“What is good radio?”

He replied, “It’s a tough question. How can one put that in words?”

“It makes you use your mind…it actually makes you think about what you are listening to. A lot of people listen to the radio, but don’t really hear it today.”

“Good radio makes you want to listen.”

“What are you looking at when you listen to the radio? It’s one of the few things that you do, where you don’t need your eyes. And so, do you look at the radio receiver, do you look across the room, let your eyes go out of focus? My favorite program would be the kind where you forget your eye completely and just listen with your imagination.”

I asked him to give me some examples of good radio. He said as far as writers, Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin are high on his list.  If he was stranded on an island with one radio series it would be the Jack Benny program. He also mentioned a specific play titled The Dark Tower by Louis MacNeice.

“[The Dark Tower] was totally different from anything else I had ever heard before. I would pinpoint that one as the most interesting program that I ever heard. It was totally different then any of my other experiences.”
The radio play is a fantasy about the youngest and last son in a family of many sons. All of the men in his family including the father have gone to fight a dragon and never returned. As he travels toward the dark tower where the dragon lives, he battles with his loyalty to his family’s history and his own personal desires. The story takes him through many magical and metaphysical situations, and has a profound, thrilling ending (you must hear it!).
“Good radio should be intrinsically radio,” Goldin also said. And The Dark Tower is an example of this. It is a play that is so engaging because it plays in the mind in fantastical ways that would be spoiled in a visual medium.

While the actual recording of The Dark Tower is very hard to get a hold of, there is a recording of an interview with its author and Edward R. Murrow and also a disc of MacNeice reading some of his own poetry in the Marr Sound Archives.

Goldin emphasized at one point, “There aren’t that many people interested in creative radio, or radio as an art form. It seems to have gone far away.” But thanks to Goldin and his preservation of so many historical American radio recordings there is a chance for this situation to change. “Good radio” is worth the listening.

Troy Cummings, guest contributor

Celebrating Black History Month: Remembering Where We’ve Been and How Far We Have to Travel

Richard WrightWithin the Goldin collection, the political roundtable debates, dramas with social commentary, and panel discussions about real and significant problems, most of which have no answer and are still legitimate problems in America and abroad, are very relevant, despite the age of the recordings.

There are occasionally discs that will always stand out, such as This is South Africa: South African Problem. The “problem” referred to in the title is the “natural” cultural and developmental differences between indigenous South Africans and white South Africans. As the speaker explains it, racial segregation was necessary to allow particular races to enjoy their own cultural differences; indigenous tribes like the Zulu (there is an interesting, if not completely related, program on polygamy in Zulu society on the reverse of this disc) could continue their traditional ways of life without interference, and Europeans and European descendants were free to abide by their own ways of living. The real and harsh reality is that those justifications are false, almost laughably false if not for the terror they conceal. A point that the speaker stressed throughout was the different technological developments that separated the indigenous ethnic groups from the white South Africans. They never used the phrase, but “separate but equal” sums up his argument. We all know the history of that thinking in our own homeland.

Racial segregation in South Africa had begun during the colonial period, but didn’t become official policy and law until 1948. The South African general election of 1948 which created the system of racial segregation enforced by the National Party government that would later be known as apartheid was held May 26, 1948 and this disc was broadcast Dec. 12, 1948. The proximity of this broadcast to the passage of that law is astounding, and one assumes, a broadcast like this, intended for an international audience (and in this particular case, an American audience) was to present it in a positive light. When this vote was cast in South Africa, Jim Crow laws in the United States, in some form, had been around for over 70 years.

The reverse side of this disc features its own stand-alone program not meant to have any connection to this one, but featured a speaker making a statement about South Africa’s hospitality, weather, and other pleasantries saying, “[T]here’s something very familiar about South Africa to an American, so very much like our own country.” Heard in the context of the entire disc, this statement takes on a very different meaning than it was intended, but is all the more poignant.

Thankfully, there are many more discs in the Goldin collection that feature far more positive and progressive messages. New world a-coming is one outstanding example. This series focuses on many of the problems and challenges faced by racial and ethnic minorities in the US, and several programs focus on African Americans specifically.

Most of the programs focused specifically on discrimination in employment, such as A job for Jane which is about how labor unions are a solution to problems of unemployment and underemployment, and how everyone has the right to fair and equal employment, despite their race or gender; Black boy which is based on the autobiography by Richard Wright (pictured above), follows the difficulties faced by a young African American man trying to get a fair and decent job in the American South; and Color scheme is about a man hired to be the manager of a pharmaceutical factory (we’re to assume he’s white, because it’s never mentioned), who hires an African American to run one of the labs, and the discrimination he faces by his subordinates, as well as the factory’s owner. These dramas, in my opinion, are very impressive programs for 1945-46.

As important as these examples of the message that the American dream is for everyone, they aren’t too far removed from the reality of the time: as Goldin notes on the inventory form for Black boy, the part of the young African American man, Richard Wright, is played by a prominent (white) Jewish actor (although another post in itself, “New pilgrim,” deals with the discrimination faced by Jews in America.)  So was the reality of show business in America.

With the risk of continuing this increasing long blog post, let me briefly mention a few other programs of note, Neither free nor equal: The hate merchants is a dramatic-documentary about intolerance and discrimination in the United States, including useful ways to deal with hate mongers. Groups highlighted as being discriminated against include Jews, African Americans, communists, Catholics, and Protestants. A program called Creighton University of the air: Contributions of the colored race to the American heritage is a panel discussion about the contributions of African Americans to American society and takes the stance that greater equality for African Americans will be of benefit to the entire country by allowing more people to be working towards the greater good. Finally, there is a very interesting discussion from a program called In our opinion: The Negro and communism which discusses if communism is a more effective system for African Americans than the current system of capitalism. Whether it was or not is irrelevant when put in the context that this was 1947 and being an American and communist, or the mere appearance of “communist sympathizing” was dangerous for anyone of any background, to say the least.

There are other such programs in this collection, and I’m sure, there will be more to come. For assistance searching the Goldin collection, or any other, you can contact your friendly neighborhood reference librarian or Marr staff.

Anthony Prince, Goldin Project staff

Back to school

2012-01-04_BackToSchool_Goldin_CollegeStudentsStuding1941As another semester begins on campus, it is an appropriate time to highlight some of the recordings in the J. David Goldin Collection that feature colleges and universities. From academic pursuits to student life to college songs, many aspects of the college experience are captured on these recordings from the 30s through the 50s.

From the academic side of college life, the collection contains a large number of forums and debates hosted and produced by various colleges. The two most prevalent titles of this genre come from a pair of Chicago schools. Northwestern University reviewing stand and the University of Chicago round table brought together various experts, many of them faculty at each respective school, to debate current political, social, and economic topics. Recordings from forums and debates at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School can also be found.

In addition, several recordings of lectures can be found in the collection, including a large number of lectures from Ohio State University. These lectures on topics ranging from philosophy to radio were recorded in the classroom and not intended for broadcast. Lectures and appearances by faculty made on local radio stations can also be found. For example, recordings on topics such as St. Patrick and modern Ireland and literary criticism were broadcast over the air.

Study abroad is an important part of the college experience for some students. There are several programs in the J. David Goldin Collection that capture interviews with American students studying abroad. Most of these programs focus on American students studying in Europe at schools such as Oslo University and Heidelberg University. These students were generally interviewed about the differences between student life in Europe and the United States, both in the classroom and outside of it. For the opposite perspective, there are programs featuring foreign students speaking about their experiences studying at colleges and universities in the United States. A good example is Dutch students speak, program no. 10, which features interviews with Dutch students who studied in the United States. These recordings offer a unique insight into the characteristics of American colleges and universities.

School songs, while maybe not as popular now as they once were, have a special place in college tradition. The J. David Goldin Collection contains a large amount of music, and within these musical recordings are many school songs. Some notable discs are two by the U.S. Marine Band, program no. 21 and program no. 23, that contain school songs from Georgia Tech, VMI, Cornell, and many others. Another is a transcription disc of Clyde Lucas and his orchestra featuring songs from Notre Dame, Purdue, Illinois, and the University of Chicago.

These recordings, along with many more from a wide range of genres, are waiting for your use and can be found in the J. David Goldin Collection housed in the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Timothy Gieringer, Goldin Project staff

Muzak, radio

2011-11-28_MuzakRadio_Goldin_typewriter75 blood red vinyl discs in the J. David Goldin Collection do not belong to radio history in the strictest sense. These discs are music–well, Muzak. The Muzak company began in 1922 with a mission to challenge the radio market by selling wired-in music to businesses. As the wireless radio sounded in homes throughout the USA, Muzak provided a wired sound track to daily shopping, factory working, lobby waiting, and elevator riding. The majority of the tunes were engineered to be unimposing, instrumental versions of popular melodies, and the product was comfortably bland. This gave Muzak the reputation of eroding the quality of music in general and blatantly packaging music as wallpaper.

But that is not to say that the composers and arrangers employed by Muzak should be dismissed. Alexander Semmler is a good example. His disc entitled Alexander Semmler and his orchestra is among dozens and dozens of discs titled with a man’s name followed by “and his orchestra.” He included an original piece called “Drifting Melody” in his Muzak session which exposes him as more than an arranger. But the music does not stand out (it’s not supposed to). The instrumentation was for violins, piano, and flute, a typical Muzak instrumentation meant to avoid “harsh” timbres. This music, however, becomes important when we understand more about Semmler.

Semmler conducts a radio orchestraSemmler was a very active composer and conductor at CBS in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. He mainly wrote and conducted music for radio dramas. It was normal for radio drama music to be unobtrusive; depending on the skill of the radio writer, the music could be an integral part of the drama and could go beyond the merely incidental. He worked with many talented radio writers including Nila Mack of Let’s Pretend, Orson Welles, and Norman Corwin the “Poet Laureate of Radio.”

Corwin especially appreciated Semmler’s music and made it prominent. Semmler’s score to Psalm for a Dark Year Corwin calls, “one of the finest ever composed for radio.” And in You Can Dream, Inc., Corwin commissioned Concerto for Typewriter No. 1 in D. The two minute piece features an orchestral introduction followed by a dialogue between the orchestra and typewriter. The orchestra imitates the rhythm of the typing, and after a minute there is a silence. The female typist sighs, returns the carriage, and the concerto continues. The sounds of the typewriter were common enough that they could communicate the mood of the person at the machine, and Semmler used this to add drama to this little composition. To end the piece, the tension builds musically with speed and volume in the orchestra while the typist seems to be in a whirlwind of inspiration, holding her breathe until the last letter is struck. The result is a jumbled, finger fatiguing coda.

Concerto for Typewriter No. 1 in D is a little gem that has fallen prey to the “ghastly impermanence” of radio. In fact, the whole field of historical American radio drama has yet to be treated seriously as a field for scholarship. Perhaps musicologists can start a new trend.

…so hidden away in a stack of 10,000 records is a disc titled Alexander Semmler and his orchestra. The music does not invite serious analysis, and the word “Muzak” on the label stereotypes the content. But with a little digging the disc becomes a one of a kind document about a great American radio composer. Could it be that every disc in this collection has something valuable about it waiting for discovery? Lets find out!

Troy Cummings, guest contributor

“The Nazis must have loved children– they stole so many of them.”

2011-11-14_Nazis_Goldin_elevenAllan Sloane knew the shock and venom of this statement when he wrote it into his documentary Eleven Memory Street (1950). This piece of creative radio journalism tells the story of a girl who was a victim of a seditious Nazi program. Lebensborn, or Fount of Life, was a program meant to purify the German race by encouraging Aryan breeding. The program which provided care for racially acceptable mothers and their children is also associated with the planned kidnapping and relocation of thousands of Polish children. These children were chosen for their racial traits for the purpose of Germanization.

Yovinna Solyska, was one of those children, and starting with a letter from her mother (whose return address became the title of the radio play), Eleven Memory Street traces a detective hunt by a team of U.N. workers to reunite the mother and daughter. Allan Sloane, a reporter for the U.N., traced the development of the case with a microphone, and mixed the audio with his poignant narration.  The result is a powerful documentary.

The United Nations, since its beginning, has used the medium of radio as one of its ways to inform the world of its aims and activities. And Eleven Memory Street is a prime example of why. Article 1 of the U.N. Charter states that one of the purposes of the U.N. is “To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character.” At one point in the investigation, Sloane stopped to consider the significance of what he was involved with. He recounts, “Something began to dawn on me. This is the United Nations really at work. A British bureau chief, working with a Danish assistant to find a Polish child who might be in Czechoslovakia and an American reporter standing by.”

Marr Sound Archives is now a wealth of information on U.N. historical radio. The J. David Goldin Collection includes over 400 episodes of “The United Nations Today,” a program of radio reports, interviews, and sound clips by the U.N. The collection has over sixty episodes of “U.N. Story,” a dramatic series. There is also a large collection of special documentaries similar to the one discussed here.

Eleven Memory Street stands out among these radio documents. It is an important experiment in international journalism and documentary making. And it shows the ugliest result of war. The children, the innocent, are lumped into the statistics of casualties and missing people. This story shows how much cooperation and energy it takes to change one of these statistics by a barely noticeable amount – and how much it is worth it.

For an introduction to U.N. Radio on the web check out the U.N. Radio Classics archive.

Troy Cummings, guest contributor

Norman Corwin, radio legend dies at age 101

Norman CorwinOn October 18, Norman Corwin, radio’s “poet laureate,” died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 101. Corwin was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1993 for his work as a writer, director and producer of radio plays for CBS. The Los Angeles Times has a wonderful obituary which highlights his long career and there’s a nice video tribute worth watching on YouTube (below).

In May of this year, I had the pleasure of attending a live performance (complete with sound effects) of his radio play, “The undecided molecule” in which Corwin himself was in attendance! It was truly an amazing experience. If you haven’t listened to the works of this gifted writer, you can request do so in the Marr Sound Archives. Click here for a list of Norman Corwin radio plays and other works held in Miller Nichols Library.

Sandy Rodriguez, Special Projects Catalog Librarian

Miss Liberty goes to town

“My, the fresh air is wonderful,” says Ulysses S. Grant to the Statue of Liberty as they exit Grant’s Tomb. “Say now, the first thing we might do ma’am, is to step across the street into that bar.” “Well, perhaps just one little drink Ulysses, but later,” Miss Liberty replies.

This is not the beginning of a joke. It is part of the radio play Miss Liberty Goes to Town, written by Norman Rosten for the series “Treasury Star Parade.” This series, which ran from 1942-1944 on over 800 radio stations across the U.S., was produced by the Treasury Department in order to help stimulate the sale of war bonds.

Many of the plays in this series use harsh realism to press the need to buy war bonds. In one play, Paris Incident, Bette Davis plays a French woman defying the Nazis. She is whipped when found out, the strikes forming the percussive rhythm to the musical score. However, in Miss Liberty Goes to Town, fantasy is used to create an entertaining plea for generous giving.

In this radio fantasy, Miss Liberty gets tired of staring out to sea, and to the surprise of nearby airplane pilots and the passengers on the Staten Island ferry, she shrinks down to human size and hales a cab. She wants to go somewhere historical that she remembers when she first came to America. The taxi driver suggests Grant’s Tomb. Here she wakes the ghost of Grant. They make introductions. The general ghost tells the lady statue that she still looks good, “a little tarnished,” but still good. The lady statue explains why she left her post, “I want to see what is going on behind my back, Ulysses. I keep looking out to sea all the time, and sometimes I wonder if the people behind me are the same. If their still worthy of the torch I hold aloft for them.”

They stroll for a few minutes on Riverside Drive, and the Statue of Liberty is satisfied that people are still patriotic enough. The strange couple sees women working at a manufacturing plant proudly making shell casings. They pass a long line of men waiting to buy war bonds (this really convinces her). Before they part Grant proposes they continue to see each other.

“Miss Liberty,” he solemnly begins, “I’m a man of few words. I kind of took a fancy to you today. Neither of us is getting any younger.  Will you marry me?” She politely turns him down.

Miss Liberty Goes to Town is a good example of the imaginative thinking and persuasiveness that produced some of the best radio in American history. Hopefully, this will spark some more interest in the vast collection of historical radio recordings that make up the J. David Goldin collection at UMKC. And, it shows us two main ways that we can approach this collection.

First, the men and women involved in producing these historic recordings were artists–artists in imagination and persuasion–artists in sound. Listening this way encourages aesthetic and analytical approaches to the works as pieces of art. Secondly, these recordings are history. History captured on discs, straight from the mouths, hands, and minds of the people of the time. When we drop the needle, a little of that history comes alive in the air around us and gives us an invitation to understand the culture and times that produced it. Good listening!

Troy Cummings, guest contributor