American Song. Episode One: Hello, World.
Act One: The Boy in the Basement
The Technology Before the Medium
Before radio was a medium, it was a hobby. And before it was a hobby, it was a war technology—or rather, a technology that everyone suspected was going to matter in wars, which in 1900 amounted to the same thing.
Guglielmo Marconi had demonstrated wireless telegraphy in 1895. By 1901, he’d sent a signal across the Atlantic. The US Navy was paying attention. So were the Boy Scouts of America, who in 1910 marched a battalion through New York City’s Memorial Day parade carrying, in addition to their flags and their earnestness, a wireless outfit. Military technology and amateur hobbyist: already converging, already inseparable.
Two years later, in 1912, a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout telegraphed a greeting from Baden-Powell himself to President Taft in Washington. The signal crossed a continent. A boy sent it.
This is the origin story of American radio, and it’s important that it belongs to teenagers. Not to corporations. Not to engineers in laboratories. To kids who built crystal sets from wire wrapped around empty Quaker Oats cans, who read the Radio Boys adventure novels—stories about boys saving ships with wireless, life imitating fiction—who understood intuitively that there was something extraordinary in the air, something that could be grabbed if you were fast enough and clever enough and had a free Saturday afternoon.
Herbert Hoover—who as Secretary of Commerce was presiding over the first National Radio Conference—understood this. He credited “the genius of the American boy” with spreading radio into American homes. It was flattering, and it was also true.
The Boy Scouts, though, left a record that tells us something Hoover didn’t say out loud. In 1924, the BSA removed transmitter-building instructions from its handbook. Three years later, in 1927, they removed the receiver instructions too. In the span of three years, a two-way participatory technology became a one-way broadcast medium—and the handbook caught up with the fact. The boy wasn’t building anymore. He was listening.
That transition—from participant to audience—is the central story of American radio. It happened at the very beginning. We’re going to watch it happen again, and again, and again.
KDKA and the Overnight Sensation
[MUSIC CUE: Period jazz or novelty tune from the early 1920s—something that sounds like 1920 wants to party.]
November 2, 1920. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. KDKA goes on the air and broadcasts the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. Warren G. Harding wins. Radio wins bigger.
The nation that went to sleep that night had a handful of radio stations. By the end of 1923, there were 556. They were coming from everywhere—from the Palmer School of Chiropractics in Davenport, Iowa; from the Nushawg Poultry Farm in New Lebanon, Ohio; from the Detroit Police Department; from the Chicago Tribune, which named its station WGN for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” a piece of branding so brazen it probably made the transmitter blush.
And from Milford, Kansas, where a man named John R. Brinkley had built KFKB and was broadcasting, three times a day, between church services and music, his medical sermon on the transformative power of goat-gland rejuvenation surgery. He was, to put it gently, a charlatan. But he understood radio with a precision that would make a media consultant weep. He understood that the microphone was intimate in a way print could never be, that a voice in your living room could become the most trusted voice in your life, that trust was a lever, and that a lever, properly applied, could move a great deal of money.
The legitimate broadcasters were still figuring out what to put on the air. A typical afternoon on WJZ New York in May of 1923: a pianist at three o’clock; “Things to Tell the Housewife About Cooking Meat” at three-thirty; a lecture at eight-fifteen; the Salvation Army band at nine-thirty. Radio in 1923 was a medium in search of a format, a technology looking for its reason to exist.
It found several reasons at once, and not all of them were comfortable.
The Radio in the Home
The first radio sets were not designed to sit in your living room. They were built for enthusiasts—men who didn’t mind that the Radiola 25 required a battery array covering two square feet of floor space, or that the batteries contained sulfuric acid, which manufacturers helpfully marketed as “battery oil” to get past the resisting housewife.
The resisting housewife had a point. Radio News magazine ran a cover in July 1926: a newlywed couple in a hotel room, the groom on his knees wiring his receiver to the wall, his bride in tears on the bed. Another cover, six months later: a woman confronting her husband, who had apparently dismantled the bread box to house his radio components. A reader wrote in to say her husband’s hobby made “the living room look like the garage just after the Ford has been taken apart.”
But in 1926, Radio News held a reader design contest for sets that would “enhance a room, yet be useful as furniture.” Fifteen thousand entries arrived. The winning design came from a woman. By 1930, the cathedral radio—small, self-contained, beautiful, its speaker grille shaped like a church window—had solved the problem. Radio had won its place in the American home. The Zenith console models, in Chinese and Spanish designs, were selling for twelve hundred to two thousand dollars as status objects. The cathedral radio, democratic and lovely, sat in the parlors of people who couldn’t dream of a Zenith.
In rural America, radio became something else entirely. During the Depression, families sold refrigerators. They sold bathtubs. They sold beds. They kept the radio. Rural radio ownership nearly tripled between 1930 and 1940, while telephone ownership—the other technology that might have connected isolated people to one another—declined. By 1940, more farm homes had radios than telephones, automobiles, or electricity.
Not everyone could afford even that. In seven Southern states, fewer than one in ten households had a radio in 1930. In the mountains of Appalachia, battery radios weighed as much as fifty pounds, and the batteries themselves required regular trips down the mountain to recharge. A man named Mike Maloney, who grew up in Breathitt County, Kentucky, remembered in later years:
“We lived so far away from other people, at times you couldn’t even see the smoke from other chimneys, but we had a battery-powered radio. I remember how hard it was to carry that battery up to the mountaintop… I could listen to classical music or to WLW in Cincinnati, the Grand Ole Opry on WSM, or whatever.”
In some parts of northwestern South Carolina, entrepreneurs ran copper wire from a single receiver at a general store to hundreds of homes—stringing the lines along fence posts with Coke bottles as insulators, stretching across three counties. One operator described it: four hundred miles of single-wire transmission line, six hundred homes connected. When the static overwhelmed the signal, they substituted phonograph records, live musicians, preachers, and local gossip.
These were called speakerline systems. They were fragile and improvised and technically illegal. They were also a community building itself a voice, because the official medium wouldn’t come to it.
Act Two: The Rabble-Rousers
The People Radio Made Dangerous
The new medium attracted idealists, hucksters, entertainers, and crackpots in roughly equal measure. It also attracted something the authorities hadn’t anticipated: advocates. People who understood that a microphone pointed at the right person at the right moment was not a tool for broadcasting entertainment—it was a weapon.
In Portland, Oregon, there was a man who called himself the Oregon Wildcat. His real name was Robert Gordon Duncan, and he broadcast from KVEP with a gun at his side and profanity on his lips, delivering tirades against chain stores and the corrupt interests that ran the city. A Portland judge called him “a mad dog loose in the city of Portland.” His license was revoked in 1930. He was convicted of indecent broadcasting, sentenced to six months, fined five hundred dollars. He later managed a golf course. He died in 1944.
In Detroit, there was Gerald Buckley, who called his listeners “the Common Herd” and meant it as a compliment. He turned down a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe. He ran a recall campaign against Mayor Bowles—and won, 120,863 to 89,907. Two hours after the results were announced, on the night of July 22, 1930, three men pumped eleven bullets into him in the lobby of the La Salle Hotel.
Fifty thousand people attended Gerald Buckley’s funeral in the rain.
A listener wrote: “Jerry Buckley was the only man in Detroit who was so strong for the common people. Will these people forget him? They will not.”
In Shreveport, Louisiana, there was “Ol’ Man” Henderson at KWKH, broadcasting on a ten-thousand-watt clear-channel transmitter, the most popular station in the South by 1928. He was protected by Huey Long—which tells you something about both men. On his method, Henderson was direct: “People don’t care about gentle modest talk. They want it strong. They want to hear you ride somebody.” His sign-on was “Hello, World.” It’s where we got the title for this episode.
And in Los Angeles, on KMPC, there was Pedro J. González—born in Chihuahua in 1895, conscripted at fourteen into Pancho Villa’s army as a telegraph operator, which is how he learned to communicate without wires. He came to Los Angeles in 1923, worked as a longshoreman, started singing while he worked, and ended up with a radio show. Los Madrugadores—The Early Risers—broadcast from four to six in the morning, the hours Mexican field laborers were awake before their shifts.
By 1930, a listeners’ club begun on his program had over a hundred thousand members. He used the platform to rage against the mass deportations of Mexican Americans that were happening all around him. The authorities accused him of being a rabble-rouser. When they couldn’t pull his license, they framed him on rape charges. He served five years in San Quentin. The young woman who had accused him later recanted—said city officials had promised to keep her out of reform school if she accused him. The judge refused to admit the affidavit.
In 1940, González was released from prison on condition of deportation. He went to Tijuana and kept broadcasting. He refused to stop.
The Oregon Wildcat. Gerald Buckley. Ol’ Man Henderson. Pedro González. Four men using the new medium to speak for people the mainstream press wasn’t speaking for, in four different American cities, in the same decade. The establishment’s response to each of them—license revocation, assassination, judicial framing, imprisonment—tells you what the establishment understood that the listeners already knew: this medium was dangerous. A voice in enough living rooms was a kind of power that the powerful hadn’t yet figured out how to contain.
Father Charles Coughlin had somewhere between sixteen and thirty million listeners in his peak years. His own post office, to handle the ten thousand letters a day. He was the most listened-to voice in the country, and he was eventually documented as receiving Nazi funding. The networks ultimately required him to submit scripts in advance; he refused, and built his own network instead. It took a formal rewriting of the NAB’s broadcasting code in 1939—written specifically to stop him—before his influence finally contracted.
Radio had been in American homes for less than twenty years. It had already changed what it meant to be a citizen, a community, a country.
Act Three: The Frontier Closes
Who Was Left Out
Before we get to the networks, we have to stop and reckon with who radio was not speaking to.
The Appalachian farmer carrying a fifty-pound battery down the mountain. The Spanish-speaking workers who received airtime between midnight and six in the morning—the “off hours,” the hours when the paying audience was assumed to be asleep. Black listeners systematically excluded from the imagined national audience.
The most listened-to comedy show in America in the 1920s and 1930s was Amos ‘n’ Andy—written by and starring two white men, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, performing exaggerated Black dialect characters for a predominantly white audience. Millions of people—white people—believed they were hearing authentic Black voices. They were hearing white men’s imitation of what they imagined Black voices sounded like. Scholar Jennifer Stoever has called this the “sonic color line”: a system in which the sounds associated with whiteness were normalized as universal, while the sounds associated with Blackness were marked as different, exotic, entertainment.
Black Americans were not part of the imagined audience of American radio. They were its content.
There’s a bitter irony embedded in the Appalachian speakerline story. The music that was most popular on those systems—the hillbilly music, the string band music, the mountain music that would eventually become country—originated in the very communities that couldn’t hear the radio. The broadcast music that came from the mountains could not be heard by many of the people who lived in the mountains. Radio carried their culture to the rest of America while leaving them behind.
The Networks Arrive: NBC, CBS, and the End of the First Frontier
Herbert Hoover had seen this coming. As Secretary of Commerce, he’d been as responsible as anyone for presiding over the radio boom—and as early as 1924, at the Third Annual Radio Conference, he said something that should have been tattooed on every broadcaster’s hand:
“Advertising would be the quickest way to kill broadcasting. If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, there will be no radio left.”
What followed: between 1928 and 1934, radio advertising grew by 316 percent. In the same period, newspaper advertising dropped 30 percent and magazine advertising dropped 45 percent. The money had found its medium.
The Federal Radio Commission arrived in 1927 to impose order on the crowded spectrum. It did so by deciding that some stations were more valuable than others—specifically, that the large, well-funded stations broadcasting to the largest audiences deserved the clearest frequencies. The Palmer School of Chiropractics and the Nushawg Poultry Farm were pushed to the margins or off the air entirely. NBC had launched in 1926. CBS followed in 1927. By the early 1930s, the shape of American radio—centralized, commercial, nationally programmed—was set.
The comedians and the writers noticed. Fred Allen, one of the sharpest observers of what radio was becoming, described what happened when a sponsor’s wife expressed a fondness for organ music: an organ solo materialized in the middle of his comedy show. He compared it to “planting a pickle in the center of a charlotte russe.”
James Thurber wrote that early radio had been “like the deck of a sinking ship”—chaotic, improvised, everyone making it up as they went. That quality, the wildness of the first frontier, was gone.
But something had been found in it. Norman Brokenshire, one of radio’s early announcers, was once faced with an unexpected five-minute gap in programming. He walked to the studio window and thrust his microphone outside.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we now bring you the sounds of New York City.”
That’s it. That’s radio. The whole ambition of the medium in one spontaneous, slightly absurd gesture: opening a window and letting the world in.
Act Four: Over the Border
What Happened When the Frontier Closed
When the FRC revoked John Brinkley’s broadcasting license in 1930—and Kansas took his medical license for good measure—he crossed the Rio Grande. He built a station in Villa Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico, just across the border from Del Rio, Texas. He named it XER, and eventually XERA. He eventually broadcast at 500,000 watts. At that power level, his signal didn’t just cover Texas—it covered much of the continent.
The United States and Canada had divided the continent’s long-range radio frequencies between themselves in 1920. Mexico had been left out of the agreement. That regulatory gap—an oversight, or perhaps a casual geopolitical assumption—became one of the most consequential accidents in American music history.
On XERA, Brinkley broadcast yodelers and fiddlers and Mexican orchestras and religious sermons and psychics. He also broadcast the Carter Family. They came to Del Rio in the late 1930s, contracted by a consolidated oil company to perform live on the station.
On the same frequency, in different time slots, you could hear Lydia Mendoza—La Alondra de la Frontera, the Lark of the Border—performing her norteño songs for an audience that stretched from Los Angeles to inland Mexico. She would receive the National Medal of Arts in 1999.
Somewhere in Arkansas, a six-year-old named Johnny Cash first heard music on XERA.
Folklorist Americo Paredes remembered being introduced to hillbilly music and western swing on border radio. Spanish-language listeners were becoming familiar with the music that would become country. American fans of the Carters were becoming familiar with Mexican sounds. The border was permeable in both directions. Radio made it so.
Brinkley died broke in San Antonio in 1942. He was fifty-six. Malpractice lawsuits, tax fraud indictments, a fortune consumed. The man who had exploited the regulatory frontier as relentlessly as any operator in radio history died as all frontier operators eventually do: without a frontier left to exploit.
But the music he’d put on the air—the Carter Family, Lydia Mendoza, the yodelers and the fiddlers, all of it tangled together on 500,000 watts of unregulated Mexican signal—was already inside people. Already part of them. You can’t unlisten to something.
Act Five: The Golden Age
Radio Drama, Radio News, Radio FDR
[MUSIC CUE: Something sweeping and dramatic from the Golden Age of radio—a CBS orchestra interlude from the late 1930s, or the opening of a Golden Age drama. Let it sit for five seconds before fading under narration.]
The 1930s are what people mean when they talk about the Golden Age of radio. The Shadow. The Lone Ranger. Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fibber McGee and Molly. Burns and Allen. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air, which on October 30, 1938, convinced a portion of the American public that Martians had landed in New Jersey.
The Golden Age was real. It was also built on the back of a regulatory structure that had handed the deed of the spectrum to two corporations and told the rest of the field to go home.
And yet: listen to what radio could do in those years. On the night of Franklin Roosevelt’s first Fireside Chat, he lay on a couch beforehand and visualized, in his own words, “ordinary people trying to get on with their affairs, who had little understanding of why they couldn’t cash a check or withdraw their money.” He wasn’t speaking to the nation. He was speaking to those people—to the ones sitting in the dark in Kansas, to the farm wife who had written to a magazine about the radio being a godsend. He was speaking to the Common Herd.
Will Rogers, who understood American sentiment better than almost anyone, said after the first Fireside Chat that Roosevelt “stepped to the microphone last night and knocked another home run.”
And then there was Edward R. Murrow. Standing on a London rooftop during the Blitz, speaking in a voice like a bell struck once in a large room:
“This… is London.”
Three words. The pause in the middle. A city under fire and a man with a microphone, and somehow you were there. Somehow radio had made the most intimate form of mass communication ever invented—had put a human being in your living room, in your ear, with you, alone, at night.
That was the promise of radio. That’s what people loved. That’s what everyone who came afterward—every format consultant, every program director, every corporate consolidator—would spend the next eighty years trying to systematize, commodify, and ultimately kill.
Act Six: Television Begins
The Moment Everything Changes
On April 30, 1939, David Sarnoff stood at the New York World’s Fair and said: “Now we add radio sight to sound.”
RCA was demonstrating television. The war would delay its commercial rollout. But the moment had been named. The next chapter had been announced.
What Sarnoff didn’t say—what nobody in the crowd that day could have known—was that the arrival of television wouldn’t kill radio. It would do something stranger and more consequential: it would kill network radio, abandon radio to the local and the independent, and in doing so accidentally create the conditions for something more interesting.
Into the vacuum that television left behind would come the disc jockey, the rhythm and blues record, the first Black-owned radio stations, and the second great frontier moment in American broadcasting.
But that’s Episode Two. For now: the first frontier. The kids with the Quaker Oats crystal sets. Gerald Buckley’s fifty thousand mourners in the rain. The farm wife in Kansas and her comfortable radio. The six-year-old in Arkansas hearing something he’d spend the rest of his life trying to describe.
Hello, world. We’re on the air.
