I remember the days when AM radio was my gateway to the world – especially to the world of music. Turn it on, fiddle with the tuning dial, and almost anything might come through the speaker. Especially if you were a young kid in Chestertown just beginning to discover the huge variety of sounds to be heard.

One of my earliest memories was sitting in a little rocking chair listening to the Grand Ol’ Opry – my grandfather was a fiddle player, and he’d listen with me. I don’t remember what station it was on. That wasn’t something I paid attention to back then, as long as I liked the music.

But when I got to high school, I started paying attention to the stations, because it made a big difference. Most of the kids listened to WCAO, which was the Baltimore Top 40 station back then. I listened to it, too – they played enough things I liked, and the station had a strong signal, so you could always get it. But there were stations playing things WCAO never touched, and I quickly found myself turning to them.

WSID – 1010 on the dial, also out of Baltimore – was the first one that caught my ears. Kelson “Chop Chop” Fisher was the main disc jockey when I first tuned in. And he played what he liked – which meant you might get a segue from Miles Davis to the Coasters to Lord Flea of Jamaica to Big Maybelle. It was the first station where I heard modern jazz, and because Fisher played it without making any big deal of it, I just accepted jazz as another cool sound. I owe him a big thank-you for that – over the years, jazz has been one of my consistent favorites.

The other WSID disc jockey I remember was Paul “Fat Daddy” Johnson, and he was a force of nature. While he played a less eclectic mix than Fisher, he was guaranteed to find and play the rockin’est tunes to be had. And he made no bones about his enthusiasm for the music – I remember him playing a Little Richard tune three times in a row – “I like that, let’s hear it again!” He also had a jargon completely his own. “Boat-sa, soy, soy!” was his mysterious way of expressing approval – often in the middle of a tune he was playing. He was also fond of rhyming announcements – occasionally using nonsense syllables to get his rhymes. He was a larger-than-life figure, in all ways. Leslie Raimond, former head of the Kent County Arts Council, told me that coming from California to Washington College in Chestertown and hearing Fat Daddy on the radio changed her life – and I completely understand.

There was more good music on WANN, 1190 AM, from Annapolis. I remember two disc jockeys, Theron Pinkney and Charles “Hoppy” Adams. Both played a good mix of current rhythm and blues, but it was Hoppy who made the bigger impact on me, first of all with his two theme songs: Sil Austin’s “Wildwood,” a strutting, honking tenor sax feature, and Sonny Terry’s “Hootin’ the Blues,” which was my introduction to one of the great blues harmonica players. (There are links to the tunes at the end of this article.) Hoppy played a fair amount of down-home blues – I think I first heard Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker on his show – along with the then-current R&B hits. Pinkney, for his part, went on from WANN to become the first Black play-by-play announcer on a major TV network, ABC.

WANN not only played the music, its DJs would appear at dances and concerts around the listening area, notably at Carr’s Beach near Annapolis, and there were regular promotion spots for the Uptown Club in Chestertown, and for a venue in Grasonville – I can’t recall the name. Maybe some of you readers will remember it.

My third radio must-listen was the Harley Show, on WBAL – 1090 AM out of Baltimore. Harley Brinsfield (I didn’t know his last name until just recently, when Gren Whitman, a fellow writer for Eastern Shore Journal, told me) played Dixieland and New Orleans jazz. Brinsfield was on the air from 1952 til some time in the ‘70s, and he used his radio show to promote his chain of fast-food restaurants, Harley’s Sandwich Shops. According to Wikipedia, Harley was an Eastern Shore native, from El Dorado in Dorchester County – again, something I didn’t know at the time. But he sure had the ear for traditional jazz, and he converted me. His closing theme was “Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay,” as performed by Bob Scobey’s Frisco Band – a tune my musician friends Clark Bjorke and Johnson Fortenbaugh have been known to perform at open mics in Chestertown.

Back in those days, a lot of local AM stations went off the air at sunset, and WSID and WANN were among them. That opened up the airways for powerful 50,000-watt stations from farther away, and I (and a few of my friends) became fans of a couple of them: WLAC in Nashville and WKBW in Buffalo.

WLAC took its initials from the Life and Casualty building in downtown Nashville, where its studios were located. Its powerful signal at 1510 AM covered the southern and midwestern U.S., as well as reaching parts of the Caribbean – where it reportedly served as an inspiration for the development of ska music – and it even reached Canada. Probably the best-known disc jockeys were Gene Nobles and John Richbourg, the latter better known simply as John R. The station began introducing Black performers into a big-band format in the late 1940s, and it’s largely credited with creating the audience for the rhythm and blues genre by the 1950s. A major advertiser was Randy’s Record Shop, which sold the music heard on the air via mail order. To me, the station felt like an after-hours extension of the kind of programming I heard on WANN.

WKBW in Buffalo, at 1520 AM, was the nighttime home of George Lorenz, better known as the Hound Dog. Lorenz was a champion of rock ‘n’ roll from the earliest days. Early in his career, he worked in Cleveland, competing with Alan Freed for the nascent rock ‘n’ roll audience; some think he has as good a claim as Freed to having “invented” rock. When I started listening to him, he was playing Black artists such as Little Richard and Fats Domino in an era when the top 40 stations were playing bland cover versions of their tunes by the likes of Pat Boone. He often broadcast his show from Club Zanzibar, a night club with a predominantly Black clientele, and had live appearances by Little Richard, among others. With its powerful signal, WKBW brought the Hound’s sound to more than 20 states, covering most of the East Coast and Midwest. And he loved to feature new talent – one of the reasons for listening to his show was hearing tunes before they became hits.

All this is now in the far distant past – note that all these were AM stations, at a time when a lot of radios didn’t even have the FM band on their dials. Before the ‘60s, FM stations were known primarily for classical music. But starting around the ‘60s – and later – the better sound quality of FM made it the go-to for serious music fans despite its more limited range. By then, a lot of stations – especially in college towns – had begun to offer more adventurous music programming, and the Top 40 format became less dominant. Today, when I turn on the radio, it’s likely to be for Andy Bienstock on Baltimore’s WYPR, or Rob Bamberger on WAMU out of Washington – both playing great jazz – or for the various DJs on WTMD out of Towson, who keep me up to date with current pop. And I really miss my good friend, the late Lain Hawkridge, whose “Musicology Show” on WKHS, the Kent County High School station out of Worton, was a one-of-a-kind kaleidoscope of sounds and styles from all eras.

Nowadays, I hardly know what’s on the AM dial – I get the idea it’s mostly talk radio. And it looks as if even FM is starting to give way to dedicated music apps on phones and other devices – younger kids may not even have a radio except in the car. Too bad – it seems to me it takes a lot of the adventure out of finding something good to listen to. Half of what I know about music is due to Kelson Fisher, Fat Daddy, Hoppy Adams, and Harley Brinsfield – not to overlook John R. and the Hound. Together, they opened the door to a much wider world for a young boy on the Eastern Shore.

Sil Austin – “Wildwood” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5SwM3XNpRg

Sonny Terry – “Hootin’ the Blues” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaQnXd0e178

Bob Scobey – “Sailing Down the Chesapeake Bay” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsXnuFldfLg