Podcast ... Historical Music

[mseabolt]

Anyone ever listened to the Otis Gibbs podcast called Thanks For Giving a Damn.

I figured you might enjoy this Anodyne. I heard about a few weeks ago and have listed to quite a few. Good stuff.

Thanks For Giving A Damn is a show that features your favorite musicians sharing road stories, tall tales and vague recollections. There's no music, just lighthearted conversations. A new show is posted every Wednesday and it's been featured on iTunes' "New And Noteworthy" and "What's Hot" lists.[/B]

 

[Anodyne]

This is really cool and I'm going to check it out. Thanks for the tip.

Speaking of music history, I have a little side project that I've been tinkering with. A few years ago I ordered three hours of 'air checks' from the first year of broadcast for Chicago's first all-country radio station in 1965 (including the very first hour of the format). Air-checks are full recordings of hour-long blocks of programming, ordered by the FCC to ensure that the station was behaving as its license claimed. So you get everything--DJ banter, ads, PSAs, news and weather breaks, jingles, and of course music. The University of Memphis has a huge collection of these. The rub is that Memphis will only make you a copy on 90-minute cassette tapes.

A couple of years ago I got the tapes, then digitized them into 3 one-hour long mp3's via Audacity. I did quite a bit of research on all the goings-on in the air checks, back when I thought my dissertation topic might be about country music in Chicago. With the 50-year anniversary of WJJD's switch to all-country approaching, I decided to put the files up on a Wordpress blog, and break down the three hours in blocks of 5 or 10 minutes, with some annotated commentary. I'm busy begging people for a job for the next week or so (and finishing my last dissertation chapter), but I should have more time to play with this project soon. Here's the blog, with just an introduction and the first hour of WJJD country programming. I'll let people know when I get some content up.

There's an Oklahoma connection---WJJD's star DJ was Chris Lane, who had Tulsa roots. Name ring a bell for anyone?

 

[mseabolt]

Nice. I'll keep checking in on it