Turn on the Radio

Jamie Music History #13

Long before there was Spotify, or Youtube; before there were downloads, or CDs; before personal music devices that would fit in your shirt pocket, back when nobody ever thought about cell phones, let alone about ones that doubled as music players, in the era before cassettes and walkmans and ghetto-blasters; back when vinyl records were the source for the music you wanted, and there were eight-track players at large in the land, there was a music delivery system that was widely used and has survived to this day; the radio.

The radio was on most of the time in the house at Moberly. It was tuned to CJDC, the radio station out of Dawson Creek, BC, until they got a repeater station in Chetwynd, then we tuned in there. Of course, with a radio you did not get to choose what sort of music you wanted to hear, you listened to the playlists that somebody else had put together. Radio disc jockeys were powerful people in those days. So, there was a steady stream of news and weather reports and classified ads and 70’s country music. A lot of that stuff gained access to my consciousness in sort of an amorphous blob; I know plenty of songs, or at least the hooks of songs, from that era, but would be hard pressed to tell you who sang what. I remember Charley Pride kissing an angel good morning, and Ferlin Husky, and Loretta Lynn, and Emmylou Harris, and Waylon Jennings praising a Good-Hearted Woman, and the occasional C.W. McCall song about Convoys or Wolf Creek Pass.

I recall perceiving how blatantly sexual country music was in the 70s, and being bothered by it, because I knew I was supposed to be holy. I also understood by then that just listening indiscriminately to whatever came along was a sure way to have your mind shaped into a particular mode of thinking without knowing it was happening. I did not want that to happen to me, so I listened carefully to what was being said by the singers, and learned to separate the good from the bad by what they said.

This is a characteristic I carried into adulthood, and discovered I was almost alone in thinking that way about music. People listen to the music, and what the singers say does not even register with them if they like the beat, or the tune. They can sing the words and not even realize what they are singing. That has always seemed crazy to me, to think that way. No wonder people are so easily led down evil paths. They do not listen, they feel. They do not hear, they emote. They do not understand, they just drift along, pushed by the wind.