Disco Knights: Hidden Heroes of the New York Dance Music Underground

Abstract

Louis Cantor's book, Wheelin' On Beale: How WDIA-Memphis Became the Nation's First All Black Radio Station and Created the Sound that Changed America, to be the definitive story of America's all black radio station, WDIA in Memphis. I say purports not because I question Cantor's scholarship, but because the book's extended title might lead one to believe that WDIA was owned by blacks in 1948, which was not the case at all. Overall, this book underscores two things I think are important to the still unwritten history of dance club culture. One is that the cultural influence and intellectual autonomy now largely ceded to the club jock used to belong equally to the radio deejay. The second is that black control of how black music is disseminated and interpreted is only four decades old, even as a concept, and it has yet to become a reality. The power of any disc jockey stems from his or her ability to reach the public. Not owning the club or the station you work for is a given for most deejays, whose genius survives long enough to be noticed on the precarious premise that making money and making history go hand in hand. In the very early years of so-called black radio, the only reason white broadcasters would dedicate any programming time to black music or black people was to sell us things. But since ideology and product mongering have always been subtly linked, the first black radio programming focused on gospel music. Nothing offensive or potentially seditious about allowing black folks to sing about pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die. And without black announcers to give political context to gospel lyrics and performance, the music was largely deprived of any power to affect America's social status quo throughout the 1930s and 1940s. But money changes everything. On the cusp of the bohemian 1950s in Memphis, WDIA became the only all black-formatted station featuring black on-air announcers. As the only game in town for businesses wishing to reach black consumers, WDIA was able to charge more for advertising time than it could as a white-formatted station. This fact wasn't lost on the