Radio

Early Radio Through the 1940s

Early radio was as diverse in its subject matter as television would later become, including live and recorded music programs, news, comedy, dramas, mysteries, soap operas, and shows adapted from popular comic strips. Like television, radio primarily featured white people. This gradually became less true in music programming, beginning with the prominence of blues and jazz, which were referred to as “race music” until the end of the 1940s. Though so-called race music soon attracted nonblack audiences, jazz and blues programming was an example of radio programming aimed at a specific ethnic market. Throughout the country, there were numerous examples of such programs, including Spanish-language radio programming and foreign-language news and music aimed at recent immigrants. The Rockford, Illinois, Salvation Army produced Temple Toner in 1936, for instance, a Swedish-language program of music and religious content that was broadcast on a local AM station. It ceased broadcasting in 2011.

Ethnic music was often carried on English-language stations as well, and in some areas it was quite mainstream. Polka music, which was introduced by eastern European immigrants, was especially popular in the Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin, markets, where the respective polka scenes were vibrant enough to produce well-known local musicians and distinct regional styles of polka. Although the intended audience was the eastern European immigrants who had grown up with the music, polka soon became strongly associated with the regional identity of these cities. As with jazz and blues, radio broadcasts made it easy for people to discover new forms of music or explore music without needing to attend a live performance—which might have been difficult for rural Americans in sparsely settled communities or prohibited by segregation laws for others. The broadcast of different musical traditions was a significant force in the development of American music in the later 20th-century.

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