When I mentioned listening to You Bet Your Life, a  friend on Facebook was curious about my interest and asked,  “How did you even HEAR about these folks?”

There are two stages where I learned about old radio shows:

1) Growing Up

My dad talked about listening to the radio growing up, but the first time we actually got to hear any old time radio was when I was about 12 or 13.  We were at a Salvation Army and saw an old set of Old Time Radio comedy cassette tapes. My dad bought them cheap and we took them home and listened to them.

I found some shows I liked immediately (Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello) and a couple that I didn’t care for.

However, I had no conception that there were old radio clubs. Indeed, when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, Old Time Radio was limited to distribution on expensive Cassettes or CDs, or on old time radio replay shows that I never knew were on.

This doesn’t mean that I had no exposure to the classics. My dad was a huge Abbott and Costello fan, so I got to see dozens of these adventures. When I was a kid, there was nothing quite exciting as a new Abbott and Costello movie.*

For a homeschooling convention, my brother and I performed, “Who’s on First?” with me playing the straight man part that Bud Abbott did. We weren’t the only homeschooled family with old time radio exposure. At another convention, a home schooled family did a Fibber McGee and Molly old time radio play with a 13-year old boy trying to replicate Harold Peary’s Gildersleeve laugh and doing quite well.

2) 21st Century Exposure

It all started with Dragnet, and you can read about that over at the Old Time Dragnet site. After Dragnet, my curiosity remained somewhat limited. I found out that Superman had a radio show. As the Dragnet show had been pretty successful in first ten months, I launched the Old Time Radio Superman podcast.

I owe a burgeoning interest in radio to fans of the Dragnet show who shared some of their programs and the Antioch Radio Network, a station I listened to on a lark as I was feeling like listening to something to relax and I heard Let George Do It and was amazed at how good the show was.

This sent me researching, listening to a wide variety of different detective shows and led to the launch of The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio and then the app. For the app, I wanted to obtain our detective actors in other sorts of roles. To do that, I had to research their radiography to find shows they appeared in and find which might be entertaining. Through this process, I’ve come to really enjoy shows like Cavalcade of America and Mayor of the Town.

I became a fan of Life with Luigi because of an ad that appeared in an episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar that made me curious enough to listen to the show.

I’ve also rediscovered some childhood favorites in Burns and Allen  and Abbott and Costello.

Other shows I learned of because others were excited about the same show. Lum and Abner for example was a show that I was led to by die-hard fans who had created a wonderful collection of their radio adventures and made available for donwload.

And there are different stories for different shows, but they’re mostly in this vein.

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I’ve taken a look at shows that feature Jazz and Country-Western Music. Now to look at the rest of the music out there beginning with shows that while not music shows feature regular music. :

Music, It’s Part of the Show:

Detective Shows

Pete Kelly’s Blues: Jack Webb, while continuing to produce Dragnet, also made a 1951 mid-summer replacement, Pete Kelly’s Blues which starred Jack Webb as a speakeasy coronet player who was always getting into trouble during the roaring twenties. Each episode would also include around three sets from Kelley’s band. Occassionally, a heavy will wait for the band to play its number before going after Pete.

Richard Diamond was Dick Powell’s greatest detective vehicle and somewhat unusual. Richard Diamond’s adventures were some of radio’s most violent. However, the show was at its most unusual, when after three or four corpses had been cleared away, Richard Diamond began to sing. In some ways, the show represented a union of Powell’s two stage personas. His earlier, light comedic leading man and his middle aged hardboiled characterization. Of course, while Powell sang a lot of typical crooner songs, he also would mix it up with a cowboy lullaby, a Hawaiian Christmas song, and once he even sang in Yiddish. The singing was usually only a minute or so, but it preserved the image of Powell as a versatile entertainer. One fan has created a zipped collection with all the singing interludes in Richard Diamond.

One show, you might expect to have music in it doesn’t. While Frank Sinatra was Rocky Fortune, he never broke out into song

Sitcoms

While Comedy Variety shows had lots of music (more on that later), sitcoms had much less use. Shows like Life of Riley, My Favorite Husband, and Life with Luigi had little use for music other than as themes.

Harold Peary’s sitcoms stand out from this trend. On numerous episodes of the Great Gildersleeve from 1941-50, Peary would sing a beautiful song in his crooning voice. This could occur any time in the program.  Reportedly, it was the lack of singing opportunities that led Peary to quit and create the Harold Peary Show where he sang much more frequently. Unfortunately, the singing was great, but the Harold Peary Show ended after one season and Peary was relegated to character actor status for the rest of his career. He was a good singer, but comedy was his bread and butter.

A 1942 episode of The Great Gildersleeve which features Peary singing

The Audition show for The Harold Peary Show features a song  from Peary.

Westerns

Roy Rogers hit the air as host and star of a Western Variety show. Over time, the show morphed into having an actual plot, but would always including plenty of cowboy music too.

The Comedy Variety Shows

In the pre-War and World War II era, most of the famous comedians on radio led Comedy variety shows that included comedy sketches along with the singing of the show’s regular singer, and usually a piece performed by an orchestra. This formula was used by too many shows to count. Abbott and Costello, with Freddy Rich and his orchestra. Bob Hope had Frances Langford singing, as well as Skinnay Ennis, and Ozzy Nelson, at one point sang for Red Skelton’s show in the early 40s. The swingy and always fun to listen to Connie Haines was a fixture on early Abbott and Costello shows. A sampling of the songs of Haines, which have a very distinctive rhythm was collected at the Internet Archive and is available within the great episodes of the show themselves. Her “Trolley Song” is a classic.

In the late 1940s and early 50s, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ comedy show usually featured a song from Martin.

Musicals:

Shows that did plays like Theater Guild on the Air that adapted plays or Lux Radio Theater, which adapted movies would adapt musicals to the radio, however there were two series that actually regularly performed full-blwon musicals for the radio. The Railroad Hour adapted a wide variety of Broadway-style and Hollywood musicals. All-star Western Theater did more Western musicals.

Other Music Shows

The Bell Telephone Hour provided regular concerns to Americans over the radio from 1940-58. The Shell Chateau was an hour long musical variety show from 1935-37 that was at one time hosted by Al Jolson and featured a variety of different music styles and musicians. Music Depreciation features classic music with a humorous introductions.

Your Hit Parade was the original top 15 countdown show, lasting an hour.  Alka Seltzer Time was a regular daily 15 minute radio show featuring up-beat music. Before legendary guitarist Les Paul made his way to television for a long-run, he had his own 15 minute radio show.

The Squibb Show is perhaps the best 15 minute show I’ve heard with its use of a variety of beautiful music and style.

Finally, Moon River was a radio show sponsored by a mattress company featuring the reading of poetry to soft music. A nice way to go to sleep to be sure.

Of course, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the many and varied old time radio shows out there, and there’s quite a bit that’s not available on the Internet Archives, but I hope that lead some music lovers to a little bit of listening pleasure.