Bobby Jay: Part of Radio History and Still in the Radio Present
Everything wasn’t better in the olden days of the 1950s and 1960s. A lot of things were worse.
But some things really were better. Like, f’rinstance, sedans, strawberries and personality music radio.
In the absence of stylish cars and strawberries with any flavor, then, it was nice this weekend to get a reminder of how pleasurable it once was to hear a person talking between songs on the radio.
Specifically, veteran disk jockey Bobby Jay returned to terrestrial radio, hosting what will be a weekly a 5–7 p.m. Sunday show called The Doo-Wop Corner on New Jersey’s WFDU (89.1 FM).
I’m a little biased here, because I’m in the cult that loves the 1950s-style vocal group harmony music he’s playing. I don’t love the label “doo-wop,” which makes it sound like silly novelty music, which it wasn’t, but that has become its brand tag, and complaining about terminology is a rant for another day.
The more important point here is that Bobby Jay is a perfect host for a vocal group harmony radio show, because he’s a veteran of both the radio and the music. He was a DJ and programmer for decades on WNJR, WWRL and WCBS-FM in New York, and before that he sang bass with a fine ’50s vocal group, the Laddins. He later sang with various incarnations of groups like the Teenagers, well past the time when any of them were actual teenagers.
He was on WCBS-FM from 1985 to 2005, spanning the years when program director Joe McCoy proved that “oldies” could be a popular and profitable radio format on a big station in a major market.
A significant part of that success was McCoy’s and the station’s embrace of air personalities, including Harry Harrison, Ron Lundy, Cousin Bruce Morrow, Dan Ingram, Bob Shannon, Max Kinkel, Don K. Reed, Dan Daniel, Dan Taylor, Jay and others. You listened to WCBS-FM for the music, but also for the hosts, who talked economically between records.
Sometimes it was about the songs. Sometimes it was about something that was just in the air at the moment. That sort of compact radio conversation dated back at least to the 1930s, when some stations abandoned stentorian “voice of God” announcers, and they blossomed with the explosion of R&B and rock ’n’ roll on black and mainstream stations in the 1950s. It forged a bond with listeners, the sense that someone was talking to us and playing music for us. It turned DJs into local stars and it turned the radio into company, a friend in the bedroom, the office or the car.
Each host had a distinct style and personality, and with Jay it’s always been about the music. When he plays a record by a 1950s vocal group, odds are decent that at some point he hung out with them. At the very least he was immersed and schooled in the music world they inhabited.
On his first WFDU show this weekend, he talked about hosting Willie Winfield’s final show with the Harptones in 2015. After he played the El Dorados’s hit “At My Front Door,” he segued into the group’s hilarious follow-up, “Bim Bam Boom” (containing the immortal albeit somewhat unflattering line “Six feet two, dressed polka-dot blue / She looked like something from the Brookfield Zoo”).
Because stations with an eclectic program lineup like WFDU don’t have to require all their hosts to keep within the same general music guidelines, Jay was also able to cover a wide range of vocal group harmony, from a lovely 1954 obscurity by the Charmers to “Just Like Romeo and Juliet” by the Reflections, which reached №6 on the pop charts a decade later.
Jay added a brief bit of history for most of the songs, just enough to tell listeners hey, if you liked that record, so did I. Top-40 and black radio had that effect: Let’s get excited about the music together.
Much of radio gradually moved away from that presentation model, for a couple of reasons. One was the creeping marketing consensus that many listeners to music stations wanted less talk. Another was the arrival of satellite radio music channels and then streaming, which acclimated listeners, particularly new young listeners, to expecting no voices at all. Terrestrial radio programmers, seeing listeners peel away, then concluded that to compete, they had to offer as much music and as few interruptions as possible.
This isn’t to say there’s no personality left on mainstream terrestrial music radio. Some live hosts remain, though usually with a strict word count, and some personalities have established themselves, like Funkmaster Flex and Angie Martinez did in the hip-hop world. Some morning shows have flipped the script entirely, making music incidental to banter.
Dozens or hundreds of smaller stations like WFDU have an eclectic lineup of specialty shows hosted by personalities, with varying levels of radio skill.
But much of what used to be radio listenership, like much of what used to be newspaper readership, has shifted to the Internet, where thousands of music fans now program their own music shows for streaming services. That’s good in the sense that listeners can find pretty much any kind of music they want, less good in the sense that finding it can be harder than parsing the yogurt shelves in a supermarket. Listening only to music we already know and like also prevents us from discovering new things we might really like, but that too is a rant for another day.
Radio personalities, unlike middle linebackers or ballet dancers, don’t exhaust their physical capabilities by the time their lives are half over. They can work as long as they can talk. The problem these days is finding stations or outlets to hire them. Bobby Jay, like his more persistent peers, cobbles together multiple gigs, including streaming services and a soul show that airs in England.
Right now, for two hours a week, it’s nice to feel like he’s home.
