Oldtime Songs as Oldtime Radio Drama

Ever wish one of your favorite old songs could go on for a half hour? Or want to know the story-behind-the-story of a ballad? Would you mind if the stretch added a new cause to a historic Virginia train wreck, or made the South Pacific the new setting of a song that had migrated from Scotland to North Carolina?

While I've been using this blog for intermittent posts about folk, blues and old-time stringband music, in my other incarnation over at http://jheroes.com ("Newspaper Heroes on the Air") I write about the portrayal of journalists in the radio dramatic series of the thirty-some years before television killed radio drama as a major element in American popular culture.

Here's a crossover between my blogs: One of the radio dramatic programs that sometimes had journalist characters in its plots also had a "folk song revival" theme in a group of 1950s episodes based on traditional ballads and blues. Posting a journalism-related episode of "Suspense" to jheroes reminded me that a few of its tales of death and disaster came from old songs.

"Suspense" was a highly rated and expertly produced series for 20 years, specializing in tension,  adventure and murder, from "Othello" to "Frankenstein" and "Leinengen vs. the Ants." As a result, the Old Time Radio Researchers Group has a substantial collection of episodes (more than 900 of them!), which it shares with the public through the Internet Archive (archive.org).

Below are direct links to the folk-song episodes I've noticed, produced and directed by Elliott Lewis, with scripts by several writers, including Morton Fine and David Friedkin, according to radio historian J. David Goldin's listings and announcements during the programs. Click to download the MP3s or open them in your browser. 

The Wreck of the Old 97 (March 17, 1952) 

Frankie and Johnny (May 5, 1952) 

My True Love's Hair (Oct. 19, 1953)

Frankie and Johnny (Feb. 3, 1957)

The Death of Barbara Allen (Oct. 20, 1952)

The Saint James Infirmary Blues (Feb. 23, 1953)

Tom Dooley (March 30, 1953)

Tom Dooley (Dec. 7, 1958)

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While it's not folksong-based, music fans also might be intrigued by the vaudeville title "Never Follow a Banjo Act," with Ethel Merman.

I'm particularly fascinated by the fact that "Suspense" put its dramatization of "Tom Dooley" on the radio years before The Kingston Trio's arrangement of the song became a national hit. A version of the song had been recorded as early as 1929 (by Grayson and Whitter), but re-entered the "folk song revival" consciousness when collected by folklorists Frank & Anne Warner from Frank Proffitt in North Carolina in 1938 and published in John & Alan Lomax's book Folksong U.S.A. in 1947.  It was recorded by Warner in 1952 (and eventually by Proffitt on Folk Legacy Records in 1962).

The Suspense radioplay based on the song was first heard in 1953, then recast and broadcast in 1958, using that year's Kingston Trio hit recording.  According to J. David Goldin's "RadioGoldindex" of "Suspense" episode information, Harry Stanton was the vocalist on the 1952 broadcasts of both "Tom Dooley" and "Old 97."

Louise Louis was vocalist on "Barbara Allen." Big band singing stars who crossed over to film and television were also part of the casts: Dinah Shore played the lead and sang the song in "Frankie and Johnny" and Rosemary Clooney was listed among the cast for "Saint James Infirmary." Margaret Whiting was Frankie in the 1957 broadcast.

The story "My True Love's Hair," uses the song "Dark Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," popular among American folksong singers in the 1950s. However, the radio play adds a murder to the simple song of lovers parting that was heard in North Carolina and published in 1917 as part of English Folksongs Collected in the Southern Appalachians by Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp. Verses of the song are sung by Ernest Newton during the broadcast, and phrases from the lyric are worked into the dialogue, spoken by lead actor Jeff Chandler -- but the setting is far from Appalachia or the British Isles. Radio historian J. David Goldin calls the tale "A spectacularly beautiful and well-written sound portrait of the South Seas." In contrast, the version collected by Campbell and Sharp mentions the river Clyde in Scotland. The song had been commercially recorded a half-dozen times before the Suspense broadcast, first with a new melody by the Kentucky composer and folk singer John Jacob Niles in 1941, and later by Burl Ives, Jean Ritchie and others. 

According to Goldin's logs, along with his "Tom Dooley" performance, Harry Stanton was among the cast members for a different radio series' musical drama, the Lux Radio production of "Dixie," an hour-long, thoroughly  fictionalized and whitewashed dramatization of the life of minstrel banjo pioneer Dan Emmett. Based on the movie by the same name and broadcast Dec. 20, 1943, the radioplay has the film's star Bing Crosby in the lead. You can almost smell the blackface burnt cork in one of Hollywood's regrettable acts of nostalgia for the days of on-stage racism and a romanticized 1800s Southland. Newton and Stanton both appeared in other Lux productions.

Instead of admitting that imitating black musicians was the inspiration for white minstrels' "blacking up," the story has the absurd excuse of Emmett and another performer originally using blackface makeup to cover up black eyes and bruises from a fight. (Crosby vs. Barry Sullivan as "Mr. Bones.") Their act is mostly joke-telling with "Amos and Andy" accents. Minstrel-style music is barely heard amidst the Crosby crooning. And, no, Dan Emmett didn't write the Crosby classic "Sunday, Monday or Always" that opens the program. In fact, some researchers believe the title song "Dixie"  actually came to Emmett from the Snowdens, a black family in Ohio.

Bells to celebrate many seasons

Mostly I'm celebrating the discovery that Ellen Kushner's "Sound and Spirit" radio program is available online. I used to be a regular listener to her wonderful mixture of music and stories, but lost track of it when I moved from one NPR/PRI station's listening area to another.

Her website has players and "embed" code for individual episodes. This is my first try at embedding one in a Blogger page. Utterly painless... Odd that it looks like a video player when only audio is involved. The program logo didn't show up properly when I first posted this, but the audio plays -- and that is the point.

Mining irony for media paychecks -- hyperlocal portals, niche news and non-profit patrons

When NPR senior correspondent Ketzel Levine got turned down for travel expense money for her series on American Moxie: How We Get By, it was a hint of what was about to come: layoffs at NPR that included her. (More here)

The great irony "Moxie" was about linking together stories of folks affected by the economic crisis, so Levine's own experience became the closing episode. Never reluctant to get her hands dirty, she has launched a new blog -- and a small-group botanical trip to Turkey... "OK, so maybe I feel a little betrayed," she said on the blog. "But when the company you love finds itself operating at a 23 million dollar deficit, come on, something's got to give."

Ironically, NPR's patronage/contribution model is one of the hopes we keep mentioning to journalism students as the old advertising-supported-mass-media model fades, especially as a way to support public interest journalism.

For more examples, Mark Glaser's MediaShift blog at PBS offers a guide to Alternative Business Models for Newspapers:

"It's easy to see the problems plaguing the business of daily newspapers in America. The Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor said it would publish weekly in print instead of daily. Detroit newspapers announced they would be cutting home delivery to three days per week. Layoffs are rampant and newspaper company stocks are down in the dumps.
"What's difficult is finding solutions to these business problems."

Elsewhere, back on NPR, reporter Alex Cohn explored new media entrepreneurship in an interview with dean of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism Neil Henry, author of the book American Carnival: Journalism under Siege in an Age of New Media.

Note: After writing all of this, I went back to double-check the reference to Ketzel's travel expense request at NPR and couldn't find it. Was it only in the broadcast audio? If you notice the source, add it as a comment here. Speaking of comments, they're also talking about the New York Times story about Ketzel Levine at Huffington Post, with more criticism of NPR for being too "soft news"; perhaps there's more irony in Ketzel's departure coming during a series on the economy, when she's been better known for covering arts, sports, plants and the environment.

Additional links:
PBS TV interview with Ellen Weiss, NPR's senior vice president for news

Charlottesville to watch for Martian invaders... again

This looks like fun -- and some "media convergence" to talk about in class.

PR students can see the fine job of "press agentry" by the University of Virginia Film Festival, bringing together the school's observatory, a major studio motion picture, and a series of underground films (described as "most hyperbolic alien invasion spectacles"), all to celebrate the most famous media hoax since the New York Sun's discovery of man-bats on the moon, from early days of network radio:

Virginia Film Festival
Special 70th Anniversary Broadcast of "War Of The Worlds"

"Just to be sure history doesn't repeat itself, we've asked the observatory to have telescopes at the ready to reassure our spectators that the skies are safe," the film festival director said, calling the Halloween show "a great way to honor one of the more bizarre evenings in Charlottesville history."

The UVa school paper's archives ("media history research") are cited as evidence that the 1938 "Martian invasion" panic over Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast brought people to the observatory, which used its big telescope to show Virginians that Mars was as arid and peaceful as ever.

If you want to get an early jump on Halloween, here's the 1938 radio broadcast that started it all (courtesy of the Internet Archive)...


Back in the spring, WNYC's Radio Lab did a terrific program on the panic over that 1938 broadcast -- and the fact that it wasn't the only incident like it. The full audio of the program is online, along with links to Orson Welles' 1938 script and more. I'll put that link in my official Media History class syllabus page later this semester, since we're not even up to the invention of printing yet...

As for the man-bats on the moon, I jumped ahead and mentioned in my Media History class that yesterday was the 105th anniversary of the founding of the original New York Sun -- I hope I didn't say "100th" the way I mistyped it here a minute ago!...

The Sun reportedly became the best-selling news sheet in this world by printing a hoax series about an entirely fictional telescopic exploration of the lunar surface. News writing students should note that story length and style have changed since then.

On Wednesday I didn't get around to mentioning that there's no connection to the current paper called the New York Sun, whose business troubles are, coincidentally, in the news today. Keep an eye out for circulation-building stories about man-bats or Martians in New Jersey!