WCHB, Detroit - Live from the Michigan State Fair, August, 1963

Hello!

First, I'd like to acknowledge that a helpful commenter or two (not sure if it was one person or two), has/have provided more information about the rock and roll TV show I shared last time around. That updated post can be found here.

Today, I have something just as keen, or maybe even more so. I've had this tape in one of my stacks for ages, but just discovered its contents in the last two weeks. Most of this tape is filled up with an amazing aircheck from a station called WCHB in Detroit.

Wikipedia reports that the station was briefly a top 40 station in 1963, before going to all country, and this tape, which can only be from August of 1963, certainly would predate that sort of switch. But this is NOT a top 40 station, so Wikipedia seems to be a it off.

This is clearly an R & B station, hosted by an African-American dee-jay, whose name I can't quite grasp, and who is broadcasting from the Michigan State Fair in Detroit. He uses an amazing, and absolutely wonderful amount of reverb (I love reverb), talks over records, comments on things, interviews fair-goers, and does commercials.

Unfortunately, there are points at which the dee-jay material is cut off and we slide right into the next song, but there is a LOT of prime AM radio from 1963 here. And I'm fairly certain that, among my tapes this is the first one of an R & B station that I've come across. There are a lot of songs here that I've never heard before, or even heard of, and this is among my favorite eras for music.

(It's worth recalling that it was around this time that Billboard decided to discontinue R & B charts, feeling at least in part - and I know there were other reasons - that R & B was so well integrated into top 40 that having two charts was redundant. Just this 70 minutes or so proves how inaccurate that was).

Anyway, enjoy this for all it's worth. It's one of my favorite new finds of the last few years.

Download: WCHB, Detroit - Live from the Michigan State Fair, August, 1963
Play:

The remainder of the tape is made up of the same person's recording of multiple stations, presumably in the Detroit area, and from very much the same general time period. If one ever needed to hear the distinction between the stuff that really had it going on, and the more whitebread aspects of top 40 radio, in the summer of 1963, one could hardly do better than to contrast the above tape with the start of the remaining material, which features "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton.

Download: Various Detroit Stations, Late Summer, 1963
Play:

~~
And now, because this is my 59th birthday, I'm going to indulge a bit, and share with you a 150 second blast of my own family's tape collection, recorded by and with my mother, in January of 1964, just 4-5 months after the above, and featuring two brief renditions of a song most small children would have known in those days, "I Love Little Pussy", and a somewhat longer version of another song most children of any age would not have known in those days, "There is a Tavern in the Town".

I am, in the case of "Tavern", doing my 3 1/2 year old best to yodel in the style of a record that was, and is, a great family favorite, Wally Cox' rendition of the song, which you can hear here. Seriously, listen to that first - it will help make my version make more sense. Sort of.

I enjoy how I stop to make mention - in the middle of saying a stream of incorrect and non-existent words - of how I've just said the wrong words. You'll also hear me excitedly talk about how daddy sings the song.

I hope you find some enjoyment in this.

Download: Bobby Purse - I Love Little Pussy & Tavern in the Town
Play:

By the way, that Wally Cox record is a contender for my favorite 100 records ever,  and even so, it's outranked by the Rudy Vallee version, which may be my favorite comic recording ever.