was something different.”
The radio stations playing that “Bo Diddley stuff” in Birmingham were some of the few African American stations in the country. As the South was segregated, Birmingham’s biggest radio stations — WAPI, WBRC, and WSGN — broadcast to a predominantly white audience. The first inroads into the segregated airwaves were short programs devoted to African American sacred music, featuring the gospel quartets whose sweet harmonies and soaring lead vocals appealed to both races. William Blevins, Nims Gay, and Sadie Mae Patterson all broadcast gospel shows on white radio in the early 1940s. The African American businessman A. G. Gaston sponsored Birmingham’s Gospel Harmonettes on WSGN. On April 19, 1942, WJLD started broadcasting from Bessemer. It carried gospel shows, popular music, and news. In 1946 a white disc jockey called Bob Umbach began the Atomic Boogie Hour, playing rhythm and blues and imitating the patter of black deejays, just like Dewey Phillips in Memphis. It was the only station in Birmingham that broadcast black music. The Atomic Boogie Hour was so popular it often ran for hours every day, and it lasted until 1953.
In 1949 Shelley Stewart got a job with the newly opened WEDR, a white-owned station aimed at the black audience, and as “Shelley the Playboy” he brought the exciting sounds of R&B and rock ’n’ roll to an awed audience of teenagers. Ed Reynolds, who managed WJLD, started WEDR radio in 1949 — another station aimed at the African American audience. By the 1960s WENN was the premier radio station in Birmingham programming African American music, with two of the city’s most popular deejays: Shelley Stewart and “Tall Paul” White. Record collector Ben Saxon remembered: “You grew up listening to WJLD and WENN and Shelley the Playboy and Tall Paul.” “Can I get a witness!” roared Shelley over the air after he played a hot song, and thousands of Birmingham teenagers agreed with him. As one of them said: “We was all listening to Shelley.” Baker Knight: “B. B. King was just starting in and they were playing his records on the black radio station … This was 1952. I was over at the black radio station before white people knew that they had such things … We went over to the black radio station, and that was unheard-of in those days, and we’d listen to B. B. King records.” The black stations had an illicit attraction: “You had to get closer to the music,” remembered David Bryan, and this meant traveling to the black sections of town, ducking down in the car as you traversed the mainly African American Northside. If you could not get the signal, you were left out of it. Tony Wachter: “So it is strange how cut off we were. I felt extremely cut off. Even though WENN was broadcasting in my youth, if they were I didn’t know what it was — we could not get it.”
Listening to the radio at night was one of those shared rock ’n’ roll pleasures. Ben Saxon: “I don’t know how I first started listening. Transistor radios were just coming out. I had one that was in the shape of a rocket ship. It was only AM, of course. The nose was the pull-up antenna … I had a really strict father, who would make me go to bed at eight at night. I would take the radio with the earphones and have a great time listening to the music until I went to sleep.” On a clear night you might be able to pick up Louisiana Hayride coming from KWKH from Shreveport, or B. B. King playing records at WDIA in Memphis, the “mother station” of rhythm and blues.
As rock ’n’ roll became more accepted, more radio stations began to program it. Loud, brash, Duke Rumore (“the loud mouth of the South”) established himself as the leading rock ’n’ roll disc jockey at WSGN — the major player in Birmingham’s radio in the 1960s. Vocalist Henry Lovoy and Ben Saxon remembered him and “all that New Orleans soul and R&B that he used to play. It was kind of like an Alan Freed of the Birmingham area. He brought that new sound here to us.” Bob Cahill: “You could listen to black radio, but I don’t think other than in the morning when you were going to school, because for most teenagers the Rumore brothers probably had their ear in the afternoon. The reason was that they would play the latest, and if Duke said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new record from somebody,’ everybody would listen and he would play it at 4 [p.m. — after school].” Davy Roddy was another popular rock deejay. Fred Dalke: “One of the biggest things in the ’50s and ’60s was that radio had personality, they had radio personalities, as compared to today — a lot of these deejays are clones. In those days every deejay that became big and popular had their own way of doing things, like Dave Roddy, and they called him ‘Rockin’ Roddy,’ and he was on WSGN and he was like the deejay to listen to, he was cool, and all the kids listened to him on Friday nights.”
Disc jockeys were well connected to their audience; they did their business in person, meeting the listening audience in the numerous promotional activities they arranged. Duke’s brother Joe Rumore of WVOK — at 50,000 watts the most powerful station in the state — had one of the most recognized voices in Alabama. His daily presence on air made him a family friend for those who listened in: “I couldn’t get through the day without Joe,” said one of them.1 Joe would deal with as many as 250 letters from his listeners every day. In 1954 the two brothers opened Rumore’s Record Rack on 1802 Second Avenue, which gave them a retail outlet for the records they played on air. Deejays played a more personal role in music than they do now; they were there on the stage introducing the artists, making appearances at retail stores and record hops. Ben Saxon and Henry Lovoy agreed, “We had a radio family at one time in Birmingham. Back then you knew or felt like you knew Dave Roddy or Dan Brennan or Joe Rumore. They were your friends.”
Popular Entertainment in the 1950s
Much of Birmingham’s live music at this time was being played by dance bands — not the great swing bands of the 1940s, but smaller, more flexible groups. Harrison Cooper started playing saxophone at Ensley High School in the 1930s: “I organized a little Lombardo-type band. Guy Lombardo. Everyone liked him then. So we just got bitten by the bug and his music, and started copying his arrangements and we were just teenagers. We played Birmingham, but it was actually after high school. So we had this real professional-sounding band and we would broadcast on the local radio stations WBRC and WAPI and just go all over the country. The signal went out and we would get letters about going to different places to play … We played all around Birmingham at different clubs, the hotels, dances at the country clubs. It was a very danceable-type band. In 1935 we were playing at the Ritz Theatre and there was this girl and her husband who liked our band a lot and they were moving to South America … They liked our band so well that they told us when they left that they would try and book us down there. Sure enough, they did. We went down there in January of 1935 and stayed for six months in Buenos Aires. That was really the climax of that band. After we came back from South America we played around Birmingham for a while and I guess it just kind of wore off. We all just went in different directions.” After graduating from school Harrison Cooper joined Herbie Kay’s band in Chicago: “I played with that band until I was drafted in World War II. Then when I got into the army I organized a band there. I was fortunate to have a band all during the war. We had a big Glenn Miller–type band at that time. That was about 1941–45. That was about the swing time. There was Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and there were a lot of big bands at that time. So after the war was over I came back to Birmingham and stayed about six months, and then I decided to go back up to New York, and when I got there I got a job with Benny Goodman. I was with Benny for about two years, and I came back to Birmingham to organize my own band here. That was about 1947. So I picked up where I left off years ago. We played all the places around Birmingham. The Pickwick Club was very popular. They had a big dance hall in the back of the hotel. It was very popular, all the high school proms were held there and it was just a very busy place. We also played at downtown at the Municipal Auditorium, we played a lot of dances there. The Thomas Jefferson Hotel, the Tutwiler, they all had ballrooms. Country clubs like the Fairmont, Hillcrest, Birmingham, Mountain Brook, we played a lot of those places, a lot of those social dances. We were a busy bunch.”
Tommy Charles had started training his voice for opera, “but I saw people around me who had less voice than I did making a lot more money and having a lot more fun singing ballads, pop … Don Cornell [vocalist of the Sammy Kaye band] was an influence, Sinatra was an influence, Perry Como, who is a guy you haven’t heard of. Bing Crosby, of
