We appear to be living via but another main second for podsoliding. Over the previous 20 years, the medium has gone from area of interest experiment to primarystream behavior, becoming a regular a part of how we study, entertain ourselves, and move the time. The popularity of podcasts—in an age of ubiquitous screens and perpetual distractions—speaks to somefactor deep within us. Oral storytelling, as previous as human speech, never actually disappears. The medium evolves, platkinds shift, distribution modifications—however the fundamental enchantment stays constant.
However the differences between this golden age of podsoliding and the golden age of radio are nonetheless significant. The place the podsolid is commonly off-the-cuff, and sometimes very intimate and private—generally seen as “too private”—radio professionalgrams have been nearly all the time carefully scripted and featured professionalfessional talent. Even these professionalgrams with man-on-the avenue features or interviews with ordinary of us have been carefully orchestrated and mediated by professionalducers, actors, and presenters. And the business of scoring music and sound results for radio professionalgrams was a really serious one certainly. All of those formalities—in addition to the limited frequency vary of previous analog documenting expertise—contribute to what we immediately recognize because the sound of “previous time radio.” It’s a quaint sound, but in addition one with a certain gravitas, an echo of a bygone age.
That golden age waned as television got here into its personal within the mid-fifties, however close to its finish, some broadsolid companies made each effort to place together the excessiveest quality radio professionalgramming they might with the intention to retain their audience. One such professionalgram, the CBS Radio Workstore, which ran from January, 1956 to September, 1957, could have been “too little too late”—as radio preservationist web site Digital Deli writes—however it nonethemuch less was “each bit as innovative and reduceting edge” as the professionalgrams that got here earlier than it.
The primary two episodes, proper beneath, have been dramatizations of Aldous Huxley’s Courageous New World, learn by the creator himself. The sequence’ staying 84 professionalgrams drew from the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, James Thurber, H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, Eugene O’Neill, Balzac, Carl Sandburg, and so many extra. It additionally featured original comedy, drama, music, and This American Life-style professionalrecordsdata and storytelling.
Huxley returned in professionalgram #12, with a story known as “Jacob’s Arms,” written in collaboration with and browse by Christopher Isherwooden. The good Ray Bradbury made an seemance, in professionalgram #4, introducing his stories “Season of Disbelief” and “Hail and Farewell,” learn by John Dehner and Stacy Harris, and scored by future movie and TV composer Jerry Goldsmith. Other professionalgrams, like #10, “The Exurbanites,” narrated by well-known battle correspondent Eric Sevareid, conducted probing investigations of modern life—on this case the expansion of suburbia and its relationship to the advertising indusstrive. The above is however a tiny sampling of the wealth of quality professionalgramming the CBS Radio Workstore professionalduced, and you may hear all of it—all 86 episodes—courtesy of the Interinternet Archive.
Sample streaming episodes within the player above, or download individual professionalgrams as MP3s and luxuriate in them at your leisure, nearly like, effectively, a podsolid. See Digital Deli for a complete rundown of every program’s content and solid, in addition to an extensive history of the sequence. That is the swan track of golden age radio, which, it appears, perhaps never actually left, given the incredible number of listening experiences we nonetheless have at our disposal. Sure, someday our podcasts will sound quaint and curious to the ears of extra superior listeners, however even then, I’d guess, people will nonetheless be telling and documenting stories, and the sound of human voices will continue to captivate us because it all the time has.
Be aware: An earlier version of this submit appeared on our web site in 2014.
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Josh Jones is a author and musician based mostly in Durham, NC.
