What became of radio after its Golden Age ended about 1960? Not long ago Arbitron found that almost 93 percent of Americans age 12 and older are regular radio listeners, a higher percentage than those turning to television, magazines, newspapers, or the Internet. But the sounds they hear now barely resemble those of radio’s heyday when it had little competition as a mass entertainment and information source. Much has transpired in the past fifty-plus years: a proliferation of disc jockeys, narrowcasting, the FM band, satellites, automation, talk, ethnicity, media empires, Internet streaming and gadgets galore... Deregulation, payola, HD radio, pirate radio, the fall of transcontinental networks, the rise of local stations, conglomerate ownership, and radio’s future landscape are examined in detail. Radio has lost a bit of influence yet it continues to inspire stunning innovations.

What became of radio after its Golden Age ended about 1960? Not long ago Arbitron found that almost 93 percent of Americans age 12 and older are regular radio listeners, a higher percentage than those turning to television, magazines, newspapers, or the Internet. But the sounds they hear now barely resemble those of radio's heyday when it had little competition as a mass entertainment and information source. Much has transpired in the past fifty-plus years: a proliferation of disc jockeys, narrowcasting, the FM band, satellites, automation, talk, ethnicity, media empires, Internet streaming and gadgets galore... Deregulation, payola, HD radio, pirate radio, the fall of transcontinental networks, the rise of local stations, conglomerate ownership, and radio's future landscape are examined in detail. Radio has lost a bit of influence yet it continues to inspire stunning innovations.

The king of radio comedy from the Great Depression through the early 1950s, Jack Benny was one of the most influential entertainers in twentieth-century America. A master of comic timing and an innovative producer, Benny, with his radio writers, developed a weekly situation comedy to meet radio’s endless need for new material, at the same time integrating advertising into the show’s humor. Through the character of the vain, cheap everyman, Benny created a fall guy, whose frustrated struggles with his employees addressed midcentury America’s concerns with race, gender, commercialism, and sexual identity. Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley contextualizes her analysis of Jack Benny and his entourage with thoughtful insight into the intersections of competing entertainment industries and provides plenty of evidence that transmedia stardom, branded entertainment, and virality are not new phenomena but current iterations of key aspects in American commercial cultural history.

In the 1930s radio stations filled the airwaves with programs and musical performances about rural Americans—farmers and small-town residents struggling through the Great Depression. One of the most popular of these shows was Lum and Abner, the brainchild of Chester "Chet" Lauck and Norris "Tuffy" Goff, two young businessmen from Arkansas. Beginning in 1931 and lasting for more than two decades, the show revolved around the lives of ordinary people in the fictional community of Pine Ridge, based on the hamlet of Waters, Arkansas. The title characters, who are farmers, local officials, and the keepers of the Jot 'Em Down Store, manage to entangle themselves in a variety of hilarious dilemmas. The program's gentle humor and often complex characters had wide appeal both to rural southerners, who were accustomed to being the butt of jokes in the national media, and to urban listeners who were fascinated by descriptions of life in the American countryside. Lum and Abner was characterized by the snappy, verbal comedic dueling that became popular on radio programs of the 1930s. Using this format, Lauck and Goff allowed their characters to subvert traditional authority and to poke fun at common misconceptions about rural life. The show also featured hillbilly and other popular music, an innovation that drew a bigger audience. As a result, Arkansas experienced a boom in tourism, and southern listeners began to immerse themselves in a new national popular culture. In Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio, historian Randal L. Hall explains the history and importance of the program, its creators, and its national audience. He also presents a treasure trove of twenty-nine previously unavailable scripts from the show's earliest period, scripts that reveal much about the Great Depression, rural life, hillbilly stereotypes, and a seminal period of American radio.

A sweep of radio history from its birth as Marconi's "wireless telegraph" through its status under deregulation, this book analyzes the changing medium's social, political, and cultural impact. It casts light on many topics, including the roles of women and African Americans, programming sources outside the Hollywood-Broadway nexus, and more.

The golden age of radio is often recalled as a time when the medium unified the nation, when families gathered around the radios in homes across the country to listen to live, commercially sponsored network broadcasts. In Points on the Dial, Alexander Russo revises our understanding of radio’s past by revealing the hidden histories of production, distribution, and reception practices during this era, which extended from the 1920s into the 1950s. Russo brings to light a tiered broadcasting system with intermingling but distinct national, regional, and local programming forms, sponsorship patterns, and methods of program distribution. Examining a wide range of practices, including regional networking, sound-on-disc transcription, the use of station representatives, spot advertising, and programming aimed at homes with several radios, he not only recasts our understanding of the relationship between national networks and local stations but also charts the development of new ways of listening—often distractedly rather than attentively—that set the stage for radio in the second half of the twentieth century.

The first ever guide to 3,800 primary and seconary sources that explore radio's contribution to America's cultural heritage.Index integrates separate listings in Special Collections, Bibliography and Internet chapters and can be searched by program title, person or subject.