For National Radio Day: A Sneak Peek at My New Book in Progress

Happy National Radio Day!

The Old Time Radio section of Travalanche now has close to 500 posts for your perusal every day of the year, but this year finds us at a significant juncture. 2023 marks a hundred years since the advent of variety programming on radio. It’s top of mind for me at the moment as I continue to work on my book Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety. I’m a good ways along, although it has been bypassed in the queue by at least a couple of other projects, most immanently the audiobook version of Chain of Fools (fall) and The Marx Brothers Miscellany (holiday release). ’til then, though, I thought I’d share the most relevant section of the book I’m working on —

…In the early days of broadcast, some programs went far as to harken back to medicine shows, which had their roots as far back as Medieval times. As it happens (and not coincidentally) your correspondent once portrayed such a radio producer in a stage play. His name was J.R. Brinkley and he started one of the first radio stations, KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best) in Milford, Kansas in 1923. Brinkley’s station offered some of the first radio entertainment programs, which advertised his own product along the medicine show model. Brinkley was a quack doctor who became rich and famous (and notorious) for a special virility cure that involved transplanting goat testicles into the bodies of men. For real!  

But Brinkley was a bit of an anomaly. His was not what we have come to regard as typical entertainment content. Thus, the program most people now regard as the first radio variety show is The Eveready Hour, which launched on WEAF in New York in December of 1923. The show was hosted by Wendall Hall, a Kansas-bred vaudeville performer known for playing the xylophone and the ukulele, and for singing the hit song “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No more”. The show lasted 7 years, well into the network radio era, making Hall a national star.

Another variety show from this early era of independents was Goodrich Silvertown Orchestra (1925-35) sponsored by B.F. Goodrich tires and, like The Eveready Hour, launching out of WEAF in New York. Very different in tone, this program was hosted by a performer named Monroe Silver, who had made his fame primarily as a Jewish dialect comedian on record albums. Silver had adapted Joe Hayman’s 1913 “Cohen on the Telephone” routine with such great success that others, in turn, copied him. With sometime partner Billy Murray, Silver had also recorded popular comedy routines on records. The Goodrich Silvertown Orchestra itself was actually The Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra, led by Joseph Knecht. Another star of the show was Joseph M. White, who performed as “The Silver Masked Tenor”, his identity kept a secret through the run of the show. Sure, they couldn’t see him on radio anyway, but White and the orchestra also performed live, for which performances he remained beneath his silver hood. This show stayed on the airwaves for a full decade.

Meanwhile, in late 1925, station WSM in Nashville launched the WSM Barn Dance, whose early acts included the likes of Bill Monroe and Uncle Dave Macon. A couple of years later this country music program began to be called by a name more familiar to contemporary readers: The Grand Ole Opry. We shall have occasion to revisit that topic in this account.

Within months of the advent of these programs, David Sarnoff, architect of the Radio Corporation of America, had been busy with the acquisition of stations, forming a network with WEAF as its flagship. It was incorporated as the National Broadcasting Company in 1926. NBC’s maiden broadcast on November 14, 1926 presented such important stage stars as Will Rogers,Weber and Fields, Eddie Cantor, the Ben Bernie Orchestra and opera singer Mary Garden. This was a major national event.

A few months later, competition arrived. The genesis can be traced to talent agent Arthur Judson, who tried to get NBC to carry a show featuring some performers he represented. When they weren’t interested, he purchased several stations to showcase them and incorporated as United Independent Broadcasting. Soon after that however, the Columbia Phonograph Company acquired a majority stake in the company and installed William S. Paley as President. The Columbia Broadcasting System, or CBS was thereby born.

One of CBS’s earliest variety shows was the Blue Monday Jamboree, which had started out at station KFRC in San Francisco in 1927. When the station was acquired by the network in 1929 the show went national. This music and comedy program featured such performers as Meredith Willson (writer of The Music Man), Bea Benaderet (later the star of Petticoat Junction and the voice of Betty Rubble on The Flintstones), Al Pearce, who had his own hit radio show Al Pearce and His Gang for years, and Haywire Mac (Harry McClintock), singer of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”. During this early period, the network also carried The Majestic Theater of the Air, sponsored by Majestic Radios. This show was hosted and produced by The Eveready Hour’s Wendall Hall, and featured major stars as Eddie Cantor, Ruth Etting, and “Chicago Nightingale” Harriet Lee.

Of course, as a sound-only medium, the dynamic was somewhat different from live vaudeville. There’s that old gag — a truthful one — about tap dancing on radio. Clearly such acts as dancers, acrobats, mimes and animal acts made little sense on radio. Oddly, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen became one of its greatest stars, even though you couldn’t see his dummies (or his lips). So radio became mostly a haven for comedians, actors, singers and musicians. Obviously, the medium’s scope of offerings was much wider than variety entertainment. Radio also featured news and sports coverage, soap operas, westerns, mysteries, comic book adaptations, situation comedies, and other sorts of programs…

(And there’ll be much more in Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety. Til then, though, I encourage you to channel surf through the Radio Section of Travalanche!) Happy National Radio Day!