On the Radio - Julie Farrar

Deep in Texas. The empty plains of Kansas. Highways of Oklahoma. The cornfields of Iowa. When I was a college student in northeast Missouri working late into the night on a research project for my history seminar or on literature paper, I could put my clock radio close to a window, turn it just so, and pick up radio programs from all across the Midwest and the plains. Bored truckers wanting some Don Williams’ “Livin’ on Tulsa Time,” abandoned lovers longing for the aching sound of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” someone on the third shift hoping for an energy shot during the 3 a.m. lunch break with Alabama’s “Forty Hour Week (For a Livin’).” A friend at school in Iowa told me about an NPR radio program he listened to every day at lunch. They read, yes read, the classics on air Monday through Friday for an hour until the story was done. This week Dickens’ David Copperfield, next week Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If the weather was bad, I’d miss a chapter or two, but it was a wonderful break in the day just to hear the words of those writers read aloud. As Nanci Griffith sang so aptly, “When you can’t find a friend, you’ve still got the radio.”

Sometimes the best part of a road trip is still trying to find the gems of the local airwaves. Somewhere around Lake Barkley, KY on the I-64 and I-24 routes south from St. Louis to Atlanta, if I’m driving on the right day at the right time I can pick up a local bluegrass program that does what I remember radio doing all the time I was growing up. It introduces you to music and musicians you haven’t heard before and tells you the story behind the music. You learn who played on the cut, who was the biggest musical influence of the artist, what musical path did the artist travel before he got to that particular song at that particular stage of his career. My kids stare at me in slack-jawed boredom when I try to tell them about a time when there were people known as DJ’s who were the absolute professors of musical culture in America. They programmed their own music based on what was interesting and what was musically valuable, not what SoundScan or a generic programmer in New York told them to play. They educated us about what we were hearing. My kids hate the radio, though, and only plug into their iPods because, like me, they’re sick of hearing the same five artists played in rotation all day every day.

When my son was younger he found “Weird” Al Jankovich on MTV when it still played music videos. But I can tell him about radio programs like “The Dr. Demento Show” where Al first found his calling. He loved listening to “Purple People Eater” and “Monster Mash” just like I did, I tell my son. Radio actually dared to play music like that all night long – with barely a commercial introduction. So I go through my music collection and show my kids all of the great music in the world that they’ll never hear on the radio. And some days I get them to sit up and take notice. My son has Johnny Cash singing “Personal Jesus” playing right next to Frank Sinatra doing a little Cole Porter right next to his ubiquitous Eminem. And on their computers they now have Pandora Radio bookmarked because someone out there remembered what it was like when radio was all about finding new music and connecting it to the old. You could even find Nanci Griffith there – but you’ll never hear her on radio today.