Mary Cliff moves to WAMU

One last post of the evening…

WAMU is picking up Traditions with Mary Cliff!

WAMU 88.5 picks up Traditions with Mary Cliff

Longtime host will bring show to 11 p.m., Saturday evenings
On Saturday, Feb. 3, WAMU 88.5 will begin airing Traditions with Mary Cliff from 11 p.m., Saturdays, until 1 a.m., Sundays. Since 1970, Cliff has hosted the acoustic music show, keeping fans up to date on the local music scene.

YAY!!!!!!!

Read WAMU’s press release here.

Go get ‘em Mary. Sorry you can’t have one free Saturday. But that’s radio.

On Mary Cliff’s Traditions

One of the casualties of WETA’s format change was the dismissal of Mary Cliff and cancelation of her long-running folk show Traditions. Last night was Mary’s final show on WETA after over 34 years. I worked with Mary for a short time, but I really feel she taught me a lot about what I know about the musics we call “folk.” What impresses me is her deep appreciation of all music, and how open the boundaries really are between the genres and formats. Like jazz and rock, classical came to be because of traditional musical forms. Without traditional dance forms and entertainments, court musicians wouldn’t have started writing operas, symphonies, and string quartets for royalty, and later the public. I’m babbling…I hope Mary’s show will continue on another local station. The strength of her show is in building the local folk music communities into one.

Traditions was a place where singer-songwriters, bluegrass musicians, blues guitarists, sitar players, gospel groups, and sacred harp singers (among others) could find equal representation in one 5-hour show every week. It was a show directly aimed at the greater Washington DC area (broadly defined as far as I can tell as the mid-Atlantic region between Richmond, Philadelphia, the Eastern Shore, and West Virginia).

I don’t know of another forum that could do that and provide access to everyone in the community in the same way–NOT EVERYONE IS ON THE INTERNET. (Okay, no more shouting). Mary, enjoy your week. You deserve a rest. Hope to hear you on the air soon.

On the new classical WETA

I am ecstatic that WETA, my former employer, is returning to a classical format. They will be 23/7* classical, taking up the mantle of WGMS, which has been on the air in Washington, DC for over 50 years. WGMS was commercially owned by Bonneville International, and they had really good ratings a couple of years ago (going up to #3 or 4 in the market), and even after they switched the station to a lower-powered signal, their ratings were still respectable for an all-classical station. But as of last Monday, they changed their format to a popular mix format, dubbed “George 104″. For the full story, please check out
DCRTV or the Washington Post.

* = I say 23/7, because the one hour that is not classical is weekdays 7-8 pm for the Newshour with Jim Lehrer (produced across the street from WETA and taped in the WETA production center). Why this hour and not another show? Only SR knows.

Catching up on reading

I’ve been perusing some books on radio broadcasting which I picked up at a used book store outside of West Chester, PA last month. One of which is a 1980 book called Radio in the Television Age by Peter Fornatale and Joshua E. Mills (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1980; ISBN: 0-87951-106-0) which discusses what happened to radio [and not in the usual negative way that golden age radio broadcast historians like to proclaim] after the dissolution of networks, and the fall of network programming.

From the book jacket:

“The authors…discuss: the impact of commercial television on radio programming, listenership, and advertising revenues in the 50s, 60s, and 70s; the great technological inventions–the transistor, FM, car, and clock radios…the creation of formats–including Top 40, All-News, country-and-Western, Disco, and classical music…and the pervasive influence of rock-and-rol ont he industry.”

Being that this book was written in 1980, they can’t get that deep into the great FCC deregulation of the 1980s, but it had started by that time. There is a good chapter on the history of non-commercial radio, including public access, community radio, college low-wattage stations, the Pacifica stations, and National Public Radio.

They start out with some interesting statistics (bearing in mind, again, this is 1980):

* There are nearly twice as many radios in the U.S. as there are people.
* More than 95 percent of America’s cars have radios, and the average household has 5.7 sets.
* About 71 percent of American bedrooms are equipped with radios, and 60 percent of all homes have clock radios.

There are lots of amusing anecdotes about the power of listening and how radio has saved lives by playing the right song at the right time to depressed listeners.

I’ll leave you with a story about a local station and the “service” it provided to its listeners:

Religious broadcasts on WOOK, Washington, D.C., that proved to be tips on numbers to bet in lottery rackets. A typical sermon: “The first three figures is 547…My God, my God. And take the mysterious two that was blessed through last week, if you place it on the five you’ll see it’s still working for you, and the 74th and the seventh verse was a blessing to Washington, D.C.” The station lost its license in 1975 (xx).