RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

Programs оп larger city stations might feature Sonny Воу Williamson playing electrified folk blues from the south to the Black community of Chicago on KFFN, Chicago (Harker , 1980) ог music from white folk singers sOch as Woođy Guthrie . Guthrie hosted a daily program on KFVD, Los Angeles , in 1937, in which he sang traditional, and later , non-traditional folk music . Later , he would host a folk music program on WNYC , New York (Yurchenco, 1970). Among his guests on the New York program was Jeanie Ritchie , a traditional singer and dulcimer player from Kentucky (Ritchie, 1975 ). However , community participation via radio music programs was almost always limited to music of a non-political nature . Guthrie's recollection of the typical censorship problems he encountered at KFVD is most graphic : Thg radio agent. . .gave us friendly talks about not singing апу song that took sides with anybođy , anywhere , оп апу fight, argument, iđea , or belief , from a religious , scientific , political, legal, or illegal point of view , nor from апу point of thought that would cause anybody , anywhere, to act, think , move or perform апу motion in апу direction , to agree or disagree with апу single worđ of апу single song ог conversation , joke , tall tale , that we perf ormed , dressed , or even thought about in the radio studios which was in a little blockhouse on a hill a mile or so away from the smells of Tijuana (Yurchenko, p. 83). Thus , the stations were typically more comfortable with community participation as long as participants entertained the audience with folk -oriented music , but they did not điscuss issues which might be concern to the community . In the late 19405, another citizen-participation idea came was being established in two separate realms . In the larger cities , radio stations unaffiliated with the major networks were selling blocks of program time to ethnic minorities , targeted primarily to recent European immigrants m their native languages , e.g . , German , Italian , Russian , etc . Such programs helped foster a sense of commumty , providing news from the old country and information about affairs of interest to the local commumty , as well as helping new immigrants adapt to their new social, political and economic milieu. At their peak just prior to World War Two , there were over one hundred such foreign language stations on the air in the ■United States (Barlow , 1978). Aften the Second World War , such stations went into declme . Managers , in search of a new ethnic audience , began to target

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