Lost Sound: the Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling
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Lost Sound Lost Sound The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling JEFF PORTER The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill © 2016 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Alyssa D’Avanzo Set in Calluna by codeMantra, Inc. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Cover illustrations: Radio Talent, by Miguel Covarrubias (1938), courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Art Resource, N.Y.; digital equalizer display, © iStockphoto.com/sky_max. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Porter, Jeffrey Lyn, 1951– author. Title: Lost sound : the forgotten art of radio storytelling / Jeff Porter. Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015041084 | ISBN 9781469627779 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469627786 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Radio and literature. | Storytelling in mass media. Classification: LCC PN1991.8.L5 P67 2016 | DDC 791.4402/8—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041084 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Acoustic Drift 1 Radio and the Literary Imagination 15 Prestige Radio 2 The Columbia Workshop and the Poetics of Sound 37 Mercury Rising 3 Orson Welles and the Master’s Voice 62 You Are There 4 Edward R. Murrow and the Proximity Effect 83 5 The Screaming Woman 104 The Museum of Jurassic Radio 6 Sonic Excess in Dylan Thomas and Samuel Beckett 128 Radio as Music 7 Glenn Gould’s Contrapuntal Sound 155 All Things Reconsidered 8 The Promise of NPR 182 Notes 211 Bibliography 253 Index 269 This page intentionally left blank Illustrations Nina Klowden with Virginia Payne as Ma Perkins 28 Norman Corwin, circa 1940 38 Orson Welles, Archibald MacLeish, and William Robson, 1938 56 Orson Welles, early 1940s 67 Edward R. Murrow, 1939 84 Agnes Moorehead 112 Dylan Thomas, 1953 129 Samuel Beckett, mid-1980s 142 Glenn Gould, circa 1970 157 Susan Stamberg, 1970s 184 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This project benefited from the support of many individuals and insti- tutions. Its early stages were fueled by a fellowship from the Arts & Humanities Initiative at the University of Iowa, which assisted with travel and other expenses. The project received a significant boost thanks to a Smithsonian Institute Senior Fellowship, which allowed me access to the resources of the Smithsonian as well as other archives in the area. While I was engaged in research in Washington, D.C., Dwight Bowers of the National Museum of American History, Amy Henderson of the National Portrait Gallery, and Susan Stamberg of NPR all pro- vided especially valuable support and encouragement. I would also like to thank the librarians and curators at the Recorded Sound Reference Center at the Library of Congress, the Sound Archive at the British Library, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Paley Center, the New York Public Library, the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, and Pho- tofest. Special thanks also to the University of Iowa Office of the Vice President for Research for supporting this project with a generous subvention. A number of experts in radio studies offered timely advice and assis- tance, particularly Susan Squier, Michael Keith, and Gerald Zahavi. A spe- cial note of thanks is due to Kathy Newman, who read the manuscript with exceptional care and insight, and to the second, anonymous, reader for the University of North Carolina Press, whose enthusiasm for the pro- ject buoyed the final laps. From a different angle, Claire Sponsler shared her way with words at crucial stages of the project. Without the editorial wisdom of Joe Parsons, this project could never have moved so smoothly to its final form. Alison Shay, Mary Carley Cavi- ness, and Dorothea Anderson, also with the University of North Carolina Press, are likewise owed a hearty thanks for their help. The students in my radio courses at the University of Iowa and at Grinnell College have earned a special thanks for happily serving as guinea pigs for my research, listening and responding to many of the radio pro- grams and texts that have made their way into this book. Jessica Lawson, a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa, provided much-needed help as ix my research assistant during one year in which she helped transcribe a number of the radio plays I analyze. Parts of this book have appeared in different form elsewhere, and I am grateful to the editors of Modern Drama and to Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French for offering a venue for preliminary work on this project. Readers who wish to see those versions can consult “Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body,” Modern Drama 53, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 431–46; and “Essay on the Radio Essay,” in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, 185–92 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012). Finally, friends and colleagues too numerous to name (but you know who you are) have shaped my thinking and encouraged my work. Among them I especially want to thank Phillip Lopate, Ralph Savarese, David Lazar, Leighton Pierce, Karl Klaus, Perry Howell, Judith Pascoe, and Patricia Foster. x Acknowledgments Lost Sound This page intentionally left blank Introduction In 1941, John Cage received a commission from CBS to write a score to accompany a radio play by poet Kenneth Patchen, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, a surreal tale that follows the urban wanderings of a mysterious man called “The Voice.”1 Divided into thirteen scenes, the play chronicles the various encounters “The Voice” has with city dwellers, including a pan- handler, thief, nightclub goers, bartender, cabdriver, street vendors, thugs, sobbing woman, and random phone callers. Like radio’s “Shadow,” “The Voice” has psychic powers he calls upon to disarm gun- toting thugs and predict the future. The play concludes with “The Voice’s” retreat to a rock in the ocean, where he encounters another man who has left the noise of the city behind for the beating rhythm of the ocean waves. Both join in howling and laughing to the sound of the sea. With its many sound cues, Patchen’s script was rich in acoustic opportu- nities for sonic experiment, and when Cage was told by CBS that anything was possible, he let his imagination run free, producing a 250-page score written exclusively for electronic sound effects intended to be treated as musical instruments.2 When that ambitious attempt proved unworkable, Cage quickly rewrote his score, scaling back his original ideas, using only percussive instruments (tin cans, gongs, alarm bells, whistles, bass drum, Chinese tom- tom, maracas, foghorn, thundersheet) and various acoustic effects.3 Still, Cage was able to match many of Patchen’s sonic cues with live and recorded sounds. The resulting score is a musical cacophony of percussive bangs and knocks that defines the chaotic energy and unrest of the urban landscape. Some listeners were baffled by what they heard, but others found The City Wears a Slouch Hat profound and moving.4 Whatever their response, listeners understood that Cage and Patchen’s avant- garde collaboration fit an emergent tradition that we are only dimly aware of today. The City Wears a Slouch Hat may have been an extreme example, but it stood alongside a panoply of literary radio art that had flooded the airwaves since the mid-1930s. This is a book about a literary tradition that, while now seldom noted, was a vital part of broadcast radio in the 1930s and 1940s. Tracking that tradition’s high points in American radio, the following chapters focus on 1 the prestige movement sparked by CBS radio and then pursue postwar traces of the literary in British and Canadian programming. The story concludes with a return to American public radio and its brief but striking romance with sound art in the 1970s, as well as more recent developments such as the independent- radio movement and podcasts. The question this study tries to answer is how literary sensibilities—however fleetingly— radicalized a broadcast medium and were in turn energized by it. A remarkable feature of broadcast history is that radio was at its most innovative in its earliest years. Until the late 1920s, American radio was a fledgling operation, largely restricted to regional transmitter towers, each independent and competing with the other. There was no such thing as a network. Radio audiences were small and the quality of programming (mostly popular music and variety shows) was limited. During radio’s early period, less than half a million radios were in use, most of them owned by hobbyists and enthusiasts with the wherewithal to assemble their own sets. A well- known sociological study of a city called Middle- town showed that in 1924 only one out of every eight families owned a radio set.5 Radio expanded faster than anyone could have foreseen. The proof was in the sales figures. Between 1930 and 1940, the number of radios in the United States grew by more than 100 percent. By 1937, over 50 percent of radio sets worldwide were owned by Americans.6 By 1941, more families were equipped with radios than with cars and telephones. For average Americans, radio had become an integral part of daily life. Listeners tuned in, on average, for five hours a day, embracing the new medium with gusto. The appetite for radio was enormous. Thirty million listeners—nearly 25 percent of the total population—listened to such pop- ular programs as the Amos ’n’ Andy Show and The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Forty million Americans heard President Roosevelt address the nation during his fireside chats.7 Advertising revenues steadily rose: daytime sales were up 500 percent at CBS alone, according to Time magazine.8 Radio was America’s Internet.