21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture

Listening Spaces

R. Purcell, R. Randall, R. Purcell, R. Randall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137497598
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137497604
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This collection presents a contemporary evaluation of the changing structures of music delivery and enjoyment. Exploring the confluence of music consumption, burgeoning technology, and contemporary culture; this volume focuses on issues of musical communities and the politics of media.

1

The Scream and Other Tales: Listening for Detroit Radio History with the Vertical File

Carleton Gholz

We sway the minds of our community and if we can’t stand up for a principle, we don’t need to be on the air.

— Martha Jean the Queen (Brown, 1970)

While [sic] all the daily tales of defaulting cities, proposed increases in income taxes for city residents, cuts in services and threatened layoffs, a little non-static music really clears the clutter from the brain, thus permitting fresh perspectives to enter. Music can be much more than a part of the décor in an airport waiting room and its values go beyond its use as a substitute for novocain [sic] at the dentist’s office.

— Ken Cockrel (Cockrel, 1975)

“They say radio is war. It may be a physical war, but it’s not a mental war. What gets played here shouldn’t be judged by what’s happening in New York or Los Angeles,” [Mojo] says. “They should take a look at what’s happening here in Detroit, at unemployment. They should count the raggedy cars and the people walking around at 3 a.m. with nowhere to go.”

— Electrifying Mojo (Borey, 1982)

In the E. Azalia Hackley Collection’s “Detroit Radio” subject file at the Detroit Public Library, a handful of newspaper clippings describe a radio strike held on then AM radio station WJLB. The Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, and Michigan Chronicle picked up the story. The first week-long walkout ended just before Christmas 1970 after then black program director Al Perkins had been fired (Wittenberg, 1970). Detroit News writer Brogan quoted “disc jockey” Martha Jean as saying, “I’ve been in radio 15 years … and I’m still not able to be an individual. … It’s pathetic to have [to] take a black or white side but we’re fighting for everybody in this radio industry. Black disc jockeys are insecure because we have so few places to work (1970a).” Strikers asked for support from the AFL-CIO (Wittenberg, 1970) in addition to existing representation by the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers (NATRA) (Brown, 1970). At one point the strikers, who were also supported by the NAACP, moved their picket to WJLB’s Booth Broadcasting owner John L. Booth’s home in the East Side Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe Farms (Detroit News, 1970a). Though a Wayne County Judge declared the picketing illegal (Brogan, 1970b), “sympathizers” eventually joined strikers outside the station’s downtown studios in the Broderick Tower with signs that read “Black management for a black community” and “We don’t need a plantation station!” (Michigan Chronicle, 1970b). The strikers initially “won” the strike, with Perkins reinstated and Norman Miller hired as the first black general manager (Detroit News, 1970b). But by January, black staff understood that promises had not been kept and Miller was General Manager in name only.

That’s when the Queen screamed.

A Free Press writer wrote, “Startled listeners heard Martha Jean Steinberg, a popular personality who conducts a program of music and phone conversation under the name of Martha Jean the Queen, gave [sic] a little scream, and then all was silence” (Mackey, 1971). Another Free Press reporter elaborated: “The scream brought a deluge of telephone calls to Detroit police from concerned listeners who feared she [the Queen] had been hurt” (Wendlend, 1971). Steinberg and several others locked themselves into the on-air studios and held a sit-down strike. Another clipping in the file, from the Detroit Free Press, shows a photo, taken by Free Press photographer Dick Tripp, of Al Perkins reading a handwritten note from behind the studio glass, the door blockaded with chairs (see Figure 1.1).

Memory of this strike, as well as evidence that it ever happened, is largely gone except within the dusty, yellowed, aging vertical file in an archive established in 1943 and dedicated to blacks in the performing arts. The legacy of the strike – what’s at stake in remembering it today – is at the heart of this chapter. Here I make two related arguments. The first follows radio scholar Newman’s (2000) position that post-war black radio stations (in her research, Memphis station WDIA) provided “a new space for entertainment, information, music, citizenship and ‘goodwill,’” and, “led to the increased participation of Memphis African Americans in the mainstream of commercial life of the region” (pp. 76 and 236). Drawing from the Hackley vertical file, I will provide evidence that WJLB participated in creating a similar place for black Detroiters’ entertainment, news, and, at times, protest, for over 70 years. At the same time, I extend Newman’s argument by diachronically following the vertical file beyond the immediate post-war period into the 21st century. The goal here is to, for the first time, set down an archival spine for an integral history of Detroit black radio history. WJLB, its managers, and on-air talent continue to struggle, as the Queen and her cohort did forty plus years ago, over what exactly constitutes radio as a space of listening not only in Detroit but, through corporate ownership and online-streaming, nationally and internationally. This chapter then presents a provisional narrative that I hope will encourage future research, including my own, on exactly what is at stake in recovering the cultural laboring of radio in a city like Detroit.

Figure 1.1 Mackey, R. (1971) Employee Sit-In Silences Radio Station for 3 Hours. 12th January. Used by permission of Detroit Free Press

Aural History

Why is this narrative of the classical network era to the convergence era so ephemeral in Motown, the capital of 20th-century music? The status of the Hackley Collection (HC) within a 150-year-old, underfunded library, and the lack of archives within the station itself, go to the heart of how we listen to our past and present. In recent years, the City of Detroit’s economic struggles, including its cultural expressions, have become focal points for discussing the health of the American Dream. However, this discussion has rarely strayed from the use of hackneyed factory metaphors, worn out success-and-failure stories, and an ever-narrowing cast of characters. The result is that the common sense understanding of Detroit’s musical and cultural legacy tends to end in 1972 with the departure of Motown Records to Los Angeles, if not even earlier in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1967. In my larger research (2011), as well as my activism as Founder and Executive Director of the Detroit Sound Conservancy, I provide an oral history of Detroit’s post-Motown aural history and in the process make available a new urban imaginary for judging the city’s well-being. To do this I utilize archival research and interviews in order to recover the life stories of a group of Detroiters in their struggle to change and be changed by Detroit’s soundscape during the post-Motown era. A diachronic study, my work starts by revisiting Detroit’s role in the modern soundscape from musicians, dancers, promoters, and critics who experienced the city’s numerous ballrooms and clubs, listened to its charismatic radio DJs, and produced its studio-driven sound. However, I also pay special attention to the emergence of a new soundscape in the 1970s with a new set of heroes – club DJs – and an audience that both reflected and resisted the racial, sexual, and class hierarchies of the time. Detroiters experienced the impact of this subterranean population in the ensuing years as the genres of disco, hip-hop, house, and techno emerged and the city’s residents mixed together as they had rarely done before or since. This chapter then is one piece of this larger argument.

Arnold (2008) argues that the 1996 Telecommunications Act has not increased diversity in ownership or encouraged “localism,” local programming “in the Public Interest.” He then argues that stations and the Federal Communications Commission need to maintain better records so that communication researchers can hold them accountable to “localism,” what Arnold summarizes as “local community standards” (p. 8). This is just one consequence of Detroit’s sonic aporias. The other, broader consequence, is the one already foregrounded by Barlow in Voice Over, his 1999 ground-breaking primary-source work on black radio. Barlow contends that:

Especially since the late 1940s, when it emerged as African Americans’ most ubiquitous means of mass communication – surpassing the black press – black radio has been a major force in constructing and sustaining an African American public sphere. It has been the coming-together site for issues and concerns of black culture: language, music, politics, fashion, gossip, race relations, personality, and community are all part of that mix. Moreover, black radio has been omnipresent on both sides of the color line, part of the shared public memory that dates back to the 1920s and has deep roots in the broader popular culture. (p. xi)

Despite Barlow’s confident claims, cultural spaces like radio continue to be relegated to the background by those who claim, like Martelle (2012) and Thompson (2001), to want to know what has gone wrong in Detroit and what might happen to change it. By grounding my work in the world’s oldest still extant, but largely undatabased, black performance archive, as well as a selection from its 275,000 vertical file items (Minor, 2015), I supplement those political-economic findings by dislodging Detroit radio history from the nostalgia genre where it currently resides (Carson, 2000).

Listening in Detroit

For Douglas (1999), radio splits open the struggles over 20th-century media consumption and production, throwing early media scholars’ preoccupation with television into relief and allowing her readers to focus on how radio interacted so significantly with the “American imagination” (p. 20). Douglas’s history of that imaginative dialectic between radio technology and its audiences maps well against Detroit’s regional radio history. Conot (1974), for instance, points out that in the 1920s Detroit had one of the first radio stations, WWJ (p. 226), while a college media text by Hilmes (2014) remembers how populist demagogues like Father Coughlin from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak made national news and directly impacted the way political voices made their way onto the airwaves in the 1930s (pp. 141–5). And starting in the 1940s and taking off in the 1950s, black DJs became strong personalities on the air and streets of Detroit, including Martha Jean, whose early career is mentioned by Douglas (1999). In the 1960s and 1970s, Carson (2006) reminds his readers that Detroit stations like WABX were on the cutting edge of FM free form radio. But Detroit also has some unique features. Detroit’s radio frequencies share a border with Canada, reminding us that the emergence of radio in the United States is a transnational and global story. My own parents, who grew up north and east of Detroit in the border city of Port Huron, remember hearing Motown Records in the 1960s not from black DJs in Detroit, but white DJs in Canada broadcasting from the “Big 8” studios of CKLW (McNamara, 2004).

Perhaps most importantly, Detroit radio has a significant relationship to black history and performance. As Barlow (1999) points out, Detroiter Joe Louis’s rematch victory over Max Schmeling in 1938 caused “instant jubilation” across the country when it was carried on radio nationally from New York City (pp. 49–50). But even without the help of the Brown Bomber, the Detroit area had one of the first black-owned radio stations, as Cintron (1982) describes, in WCHB in nearby Inkster and, as documented by Smith (1999), a robust, politically motivated black civic and cultural movement that produced, amongst other things, Motown Records. As I have described before (2009) and document below, in the 1960s and 1970s, black program directors, general managers, and on-air talent pushed owners for increased control over management decisions as well as content of stations like WJLB. The result of that radio rebellion was that in the 1980s and 1990s, black DJs were key in disseminating and establishing the sonic signature of contemporary electronic music including disco, house, techno, and hip hop.

This makes WJLB a compelling point of entry for an understanding of Detroit as a radio-powered listening space. White-owned yet long associated with the cultivation of a black audience, WJLB’s extended story, from the early years of broadcasting to our contemporary convergence era, as glimpsed by the vertical file, serves as a rich site to engage the larger history of Detroit radio and provides a counterpoint to larger national stories and other regional archives.

1941–1967: “Designed for the Future”

According to Detroit Free Press (1941b), on March 10, 1941 Governor Van Wagoner would join owner John Booth to commemorate WJLB’s new studios. The paper reported the name of New York “acoustical consultant” Sidney Wolf and quoted Booth: “Our broadcasting studios,” he said, “were designed for the future. We will keep abreast of the latest radio developments.” It would eventually broadcast at 1400 AM.

As Woodford (1965), Brevard (2001), and Minor (2015) discuss, the E. Azalia Hackley Collection was founded in 1943 by a gift from the Detroit Musicians’ Association and named after E. Azalia Hackley, a vocalist, music teacher, and cultural activist from an earlier generation in Detroit. Clippings from before the founding of the collection deemed relevant to the new black-focused Hackley Collection were brought over from the Music and Drama Department’s own vertical file. According to these early clippings, WJLB first began its life as WMBC in 1926. From the start, it was an independent radio station in a pre-network era that, as part of its regular programming, sought out immigrant populations who had come to Detroit for industrial jobs during World War I. Booth Broadcasting, which took over the station in 1940, was founded in Detroit by John Booth in 1939 but had roots in his father Ralph Herman Booth’s 19th-century newspaper empire. The elder Booth was one of Detroit’s most influential citizens. Along with his brother George, he was part of the early ownership history of the Detroit News as well as a founder of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He also helped establish the Cranbrook Educational Community north of Detroit in Bloomfield Hills. The company wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Listening in on the 21st Century
• 1 The Scream and Other Tales: Listening for Detroit Radio History with the Vertical File
• 2 ‘On Tape’: Cassette Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow Now
• 3 Radio in Transit: Satellite Technology, Cars, and the Evolution of Musical Genres
• 4 The Internet and the Death of Jazz: Race, Improvisation, and the Crisis of Community
• 5 A Brief Consideration of the Hip-Hop Biopic
• 6 Love Streams
• 7 A Case for Musical Privacy
• 8 Digital Music and Public Goods
• 9 The Preservation Paradox
• 10 Headphones are the New Walls: Music in the Workplace in the Digital Age
• 11 Researching the Mobile Phone Ringtone: Towards and Beyond The Ringtone Dialectic
• Index