Radio
A Lesson Before Dying takes place at a pivotal moment in the history of broadcast radio. Its historical setting puts the narrative just after radio’s cultural apotheosis and just prior to the ascendancy of broadcast television and commercial FM radio. According to radio scholar Michele Hilmes, radio had its “heyday” between 1937 and 1946, when variety shows and dramas dominated the radio dial (184). As television took over those genres of entertainment, radio stations pivoted to new types of programs. The rise of the “disc jockey” and a turn toward Black audiences worked hand-in-hand to carve out on-air space for jazz, blues, and R&B—the sorts of music Jefferson listens to in his jail cell. The desegregation of radio began in the late 1940s to create new opportunities for advertising. In turn, Black-oriented programming shaped the emergence of post-war youth culture.
Radio stations in Southern metropolises led the way toward integrating the airwaves. WDIA in Memphis, TN hired Nat D. Williams to create programming for Black listeners, putting him on-air in October 1948 with his Tan Town Jamboree. The show’s success led WDIA to hire a full roster of Black DJs—including a young B.B. King—making it the first station to convert to what the industry called a “black format.” During the same period in New Orleans, Vernon Winslow worked at WJMR teaching white DJ Duke Theile to speak in hip, Black vernacular as the character Poppa Stoppa. They created a radio version of Blackface minstrelsy rather than let Winslow, a Black man, host his own show. One day Theile turned up late to work, so Winslow opened the show. For that, WJMR fired him. He got his own show Jivin’ with Jax in May 1949 on WWEZ, but had to broadcast via telephone because the radio station would not let him in their studios (Baptiste 208-11). Even as radio programming began to integrate the sound of broadcast media, the institutions producing those sounds remained largely off limits to Black talent.
Many of the stations courting Black audiences operated at the local level. WDIA and WJMR broadcast at only 250 watts in 1948, limiting them to urban audiences, while WWEZ broadcast at 5,000 watts to the entire New Orleans metropolitan area (Cantor 107; Baptiste 206). Local broadcasting grew in popularity as music programs moved to the FM dial, which enabled higher sound quality but shorter broadcast ranges. In the late 1940s, however, AM still predominated and some of the larger, 50,000-watt stations also started catering to integrated audiences. Nashville’s WLAC grew especially prominent during this period, in part because their signal reached from Canada down to parts of the Caribbean, putting the entire Southeastern United States within its nighttime range, when AM signals are at peak strength. The station’s nighttime DJs were especially popular, leading the station to describe itself as “the nighttime station for half the nation.” They attracted listeners by playing what at the time were considered “race records,” that is, Black artists who rarely got played on mainstream radio programs during the day. Those nighttime shows aimed at Black audiences but ended up attracting other demographics as well. Young white fans who otherwise had little access to that music became a major part of WLAC’s listening public. DJ Bill “Hossman” Allen referred to them as “the under the sheets club” because they had to hide their radio consumption from disapproving parents. In some cases, no doubt, parental disapproval contributed to the appeal. While their fans lived segregated lives, WLAC helped create a national youth culture organized around the consumption of music that had, until the late-1940s, been limited to Black communities. Although only just visible in the novel, that youth culture—and WLAC in particular—serves as a shared point of reference bridging the divide between Grant and Jefferson.
