Black Radio Research Articles

Black Radio’s Contribution to Collective and Cultural Memory: Personnel Perspectives of Black Radio History in the United States

ABSTRACT This interdisciplinary research investigates the significance of the community connection between Black radio personnel and their audiences through the lens of collective and cultural memory narratives. The study addresses two key research questions. First, how do Black radio personnel’s collective and cultural memories contribute to the Black public sphere? Second, what are the defining characteristics in developing parasocial relationships and interactions between Black radio personalities and their audiences? The qualitative research employs an autoethnographic methodology and a questionnaire, utilizing insights gained from the author’s experiences working at a Black-owned radio network and station. The questionnaire, distributed to key informants in the field, explores narratives related to Black radio station engagement, memorable moments, and public service programming. The findings reveal diverse stories, including community mobilization around social issues and the unique role of Black radio in shaping local and national events. The exploration of parasocial relationships among Black radio personnel demonstrates positive connections with listeners, ranging from on-air interactions to long-term friendships. Despite occasional challenges and boundary issues, the study highlights the deep emotional impact of these relationships and their role in fostering loyalty and engagement within the Black community. The research contributes to the documentation of Black radio history, emphasizing its role as a cultural memory maker and underscoring the need for expanded archival efforts in this area.

Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was – Documenting Radio on the Radio

ABSTRACT During the mid-1990s, the Smithsonian Institution’s documentary series, Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, aired on hundreds of public radio stations nationwide. The series explored approximately 70 years of the history and socio-cultural impact of African Americans in radio – an ambitious and unprecedented undertaking. No previous radio documentary series had attempted to examine, so expansively, this influential subset of the broadcast industry. Given this author’s service as one of the producers of this historic series, this paper will provide an insider’s perspective on Black Radio’s creation and significance, and it will suggest that the series may serve as an inspirational roadmap for future media production and preservation efforts.

The HistoryMakers as Helper in Understanding Black Radio Resilience

ABSTRACT Grounded theory offers a way to examine the journeys of Black radio leaders. A group of 14 radio station leaders interviewed by The HistoryMakers and available in the HistoryMakers Digital Archive were selected for the following areas: educational background, career path, journey into the radio industry, management strategy, and insights on sustainability of the Black Radio medium. The 14 radio leaders did not reflect a consistent pattern of career preparation. Four initial building blocks—ownership, leadership, management and outlook led to a second tier of themes—that together form the “Tenets of Black Radio Resilience.”

Symposium Guest Editors’ Introduction: Acknowledging the Historical and Contemporary Impact of Black Radio

Symposium Guest Editors’ Introduction: Acknowledging the Historical and Contemporary Impact of Black Radio

Research of Machine Learning Algorithm for Broadcasting Spectrum Signal Processing

FM broadcasting is mainly used to transmit sound and other signals in the form of wireless transmission. This thesis is based on a project for a radio department, and mainly focuses on the broadcasting frequency band, uses radio monitoring equipment to scan the spectrum signal of the broadcasting frequency band, and performs the data preprocessing, signal feature extraction and classification processing of the radio frequency spectrum signal on the extracted spectrum signal, so as to extract abnormal signals such as pseudo base stations, black radio, cheats in exams, etc. Firstly, relevant pre-processing is performed on the spectrum information of the broadcast frequency band. Through the improved K-Means algorithm, the original sample data including the glitch signal is eliminated, and the original signal is processed through the wavelet analysis of the spectrum signal. The original signal was decomposed by wavelet and wavelet reconstruction, so as to achieve the purpose of denoising the original signal. Secondly, based on the analysis of signal characteristics and the comparison of a large number of spectrum signals, a method for extracting individual features of spectrum signals is summarized. Finally, the grey relational degree cluster Analysis is used to extract the features of the spectrum signal, which provides a certain basis for the subsequent classification algorithm.

Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age”

“Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age’” argues that U.S. black listenership has been all but ignored in radio scholarship regarding the 1930s-1950s, as has the context of America’s racial segregation and radio’s active role in affirming and propagating it. The essay argues for an expanded understanding of archive and archival methodology in order to gain a more complex, accurate, and varied understanding of historical black listenership, and, toward that end, performs culturally contextualized close textual analysis across media: a 1937 Lead Belly song (“Turn Yo’ Radio On”), Joe Bostic’s column for The People’s Voice in the 1940s, Frederic Wakeman’s 1946 novel The Hucksters, a 1949 feature on black listeners in Sponsor magazine, a 1934 Vitaphone Short featuring Cab Calloway, and Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Through engaging with widely-varied representations of black radio listenership, Stoever argues that black listening practices from this period not only challenge the periodization of this era as the “Golden Age” of American radio, but also upend traditional categories of active, passive, and “resistant” listening that scholars have employed to understand media reception, revealing that active listening can look and sound different for black listeners, particularly in a period when listening “actively” to segregated media in ways prescribed by the dominant culture often proved to be deleterious. The act of “turning one’s radio on” was a complicated act of agency for black listeners, not simply a passive form of ignorance, escape, and/or anesthetization as popularly represented.

A New Kind of Blue: The Power of Suggestion & the Pleasure of Groove in Robert Glasper's Black Radio

This essay places the important Robert Glasper Experiment recording “Black Radio” (2012) within its artistic, commercial, and critical contexts. As a project that combines genres, “Black Radio” did more than challenge different communities of listeners; it invited them to see how Glasper's sonic juxtapositions could be logically aligned. Jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and gospel merge in “Black Radio” to form a stylish, forward-looking contribution that won popular and critical successes. Glasper and his ensemble toy with the social contracts that have established boundaries around sonic language; indeed, he makes their territories feel seamless and natural. Because of the success of the project, we may be witnessing a post-genre moment that disrupts traditional ideas about music that have been preciously held in the industry since it emerged in the late-nineteenth century.

“The Way We Hear Ourselves is Different from the Way Others Hear Us”: Exploring the Literate Identities of a Black Radio Youth Collective

How do black students acquire academic literacy skills without being severed from their cultural and historical identit(ies)? In this article, the author presents instances of literacy events in an out-of-school program called Youth Voices that serves to create opportunities for development of a strong sense of historical and cultural identity. An examination of Youth Voices provides insight into African American adolescent language and literacy learning at the intersection of youth media production and civic engagement.

The Urbanization of the Billboard Top Album and Singles Charts: How SoundScan Changed the Game

IntroductionIt's been said anonymously, and repeated in many industry circles, music business is a game where you can't make a living, only a killing. The key is to try to have as many (successes) in a row as you can. Following that line of thinking, the reading, studying, and analyzing of Billboard magazine's weekly charts is a practice many music professionals engage in to make decisions on behalf of their companies, artists, clients, or associates in an attempt to create as many successive killings as possible. Every game has rules and regulations that have to be complied with in order for contestants to be successful. In addition to the rules, certain practices, procedures, and methods make the process of playing and chances of winning greater. Occasionally, certain rules, practices, and protocols undergo severe adjustments that may create controversy and redirect the course of the game. This article is written to both document and examine an adjustment in Billboard chart-ranking methodology that changed not only the genre make-up of the charts, but also influenced several elements of a burgeoning music industry during its peak period, the 1990s, and beyond.Billboard, the leading and sole surviving weekly music publication,1 has ranked music since 1942 under various designations including Race Records, Harlem Hit Parade, R&B, Soul, and music charts.2 In 1948, Billboard's chart manager, Jerry Wexler, coined the term Rhythm and Blues (R&B) to identify music that was marketed primarily to consumers and played on stations targeting listeners. Since that time, R&B music has had a significant impact on the popular music scene. Soultracks.com's Chris Rizak says:While its influence had been silently profound during most of the 20th century, in the 1960s music firmly established itself as the music of a nation. Motown called itself of Young America, and popular secular music derived from Gospel and Blues roots became the dominant creative and cultural driver-a role it would maintain for the next several decades.3Motown's promulgation of the Sound of Young America did accelerate the popularity of music among the general market audience. The influence of R&B/Soul music continues to this day with the recent rise of an Electronic Dance (EDM) genre that was born out of the musical stylings of the R&B/Disco music of the 1970s.Urban music initially was a term used to reference a musical genre of the 1980s and 90s defined by recordings by Rhythm and Blues or Soul artists with broad crossover appeal. contemporary began as an American format designed to appeal to advertisers who felt that black radio would not reach a wide enough audience.4 Rap/Hip-Hop music, also an urban art form, originated in the boroughs of New York City in the latter 1970s and 80s. As Rap/Hip-Hop music (an extension of R&B/Soul) grew during the last two decades of the twentieth century, the term Urban Music was employed to identify the aggregate genres.Billboard s change of methodology in determining Top Album and Hot 100 Singles chart rankings to include the use of actual point-of-sale information from SoundScan in 1991 led to a significant increase in the sales, amount, and frequency of music being programmed on Top 40 in the latter 90s and extending into the new millennium. It also gave rise to other significant changes in the music business in general that are worth noting.History of Billboard's Top Album and Singles ChartsOn March 24, 1956 Billboard inaugurated a weekly Best Selling Popular Albums chart in response to the explosion in sales of R&B influenced Rock & Roll music. Prior to that time, R&B music was relegated to only R&B charts that marginalized the significance of its actual market appeal. Ironically, the chart's first number-one album was Belafonte by Harry Belafonte. …

The African American Women and Mass Media campaign: a CDC breast cancer screening project.

For decades, black radio has reached African American communities with relevant, culturally appropriate information, and it continues to be an ideal communication channel to use for contemporary health promotion. In an effort to combat excess breast cancer mortality rates and help eliminate cancer disparities among low-income African American women, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Division of Cancer Prevention and Control designed, implemented, and evaluated the African American Women and Mass Media (AAMM) pilot campaign. The AAMM campaign uses black radio, radio stations with broad African American listenership, as a platform for targeted, culturally competent health promotion and outreach to low-income, African American women. The AAMM campaign uses radio advertisements and print materials disseminated in predominantly African American neighborhoods to promote awareness of breast cancer, early detection, and the CDC's National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP). Evaluation of the AAMM campaign found that the campaign successfully reached its target audience of low-income, African American women and increased women's awareness of breast cancer screening services through the Breast and Cervical Cancer Program in Savannah and Macon, Georgia.

NEOLIBERALISM, NOSTALGIA, RACE POLITICS, AND THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SPHERE

I done got my feet caught up in the sweet flypaper of life. Langston Hughes, 1955 April 24, 2005: Katy Hogan, owner of the radical Chicago coffeehouse Heartland Cafe, at speak-out against the Iraq ...

Sefton Delmer. Corsaire des ondes de sa Majesté

This document deals with the subversive operations carried out by the British during the Second World War, using Black Radio as a means of propaganda in order to undermine the enemy’s war effort. Indeed, if the Germans were considered as the masters of White Propaganda, the British would soon become the true specialists of a new form of psychological warfare: Black Propaganda. A team was set up in England under the orders of a journalist called Sefton Delmer, who had spent many years in Germany. He spoke perfect German and knew German society and its social customs. We will define the different “colours” of the propaganda carried out and then study to what extent these actions were successful in the struggle for victory in Europe and how the waves were used as an efficient weapon of deception directed towards the Reich and its allies.

Black Radio and Civil Rights: Birmingham, 1956–1963

The Birmingham civil rights movement, under the leadership of Fred Shuttlesworth, challenged a social system based on segregation and White supremacy. This study explores the degree to which Birmingham radio stations covered the struggle for freedom and equality. Mainstream stations did little in the way of coverage. Announcers at Black-oriented stations, under pressure from White owners to avoid controversy, reluctantly followed the status quo. However, a brilliant programming strategy at the leading Black station in the market encouraged civic participation, facilitated the flow of information about civil rights activities, and ultimately led the way to positive social change.

KJLH-FM, South Central's Hub to the World: Black Radio's Emergence on the Internet

KJLH-FM's Peabody Award winning Front Page programme was transformed in 1992 during the Los Angeles civil unrest. Ten years later, the internet provided the impetus for KJLH to present its community issues to a national audience, while continuing its commitment to local listeners. This case study examines how one small community commercial radio station extended its audience through streaming its popular and controversial public affairs programme across the internet. KJLH-FM, with only 5,600 watts of transmitting power, has embraced new technologies in its efforts to extend its audience across the USA and beyond, and to remain competitively and civically engaged in a highly deregulated and consolidated marketplace.

Black Radio Politically Defined: Communicating Community and Political Empowerment Through Stevie Wonder's KJLH-FM, 1992-2002

KJLH-FM's community service activities demonstrate that the station's mission is more than talk; it is action. It acted upon residents' needs during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and has remained responsive to its audience. "Front Page," KJLH-FM's flagship program, served as an alternative voice in South Central Los Angeles and across the United States. KJLH-FM's response to the 1992 uprising was the reference point that the researcher used to identify themes and/or patterns defining the station's community role, especially as it affected civic participation and political mobilization. Beyond listeners' anxieties regarding the "violence" in the streets and their criticism directed toward the "Los Angeles Police Department," community empowerment and unity emerged among the top themes of the 1992 "Front Page" on-air transcripts. The KJLH-FM case, in particular, presents a rare opportunity to study the community responsiveness of Los Angeles' only independently Black-owned station within the context of a historical event as well as examine its relationship with other U.S. Black/urban radio stations. A significant factor that led to the station's grasp of community issues in 1992 was its location, or proximity to its listeners. KJLH-FM also has a uniquely prominent position in its community, given its ability to draw celebrities and politicians into major events and discussions.

Black Talk Radio: Defining Community Needs and Identity

Black Talk Radio: Defining Community Needs and Identity

The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, The “Negro Market” and the Civil Rights Movement

The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, The “Negro Market” and the Civil Rights Movement

Voice over: the making of black radio

Voice over: the making of black radio

Legendary pioneers of black radio

Preface Introduction: On-Air Power--Legendary Pioneers of Black Radio William T. Hoss Allen Eddie Castleberry Sir Johnny O. Compton Moses Lindberg Lucky Cordell Larry Dean Faulkner Jack Gibson Joltin' Joe Howard Maurice Hot Rod Hulbert, Jr. Al Jefferson Tom Joyner Eddie O'Jay Norman W. Spaulding Richard Stams Roy Wood, Sr. Conclusion Bibliography Index

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

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