THRU THE YEARS...
by Bob Walker
New Orleanians love red beans 'n rice, kingcakes, Mardi Gras, memories of
Pontchartrain Beach, crawfish, and...oldies.
They love their oldies with good reason. Their city was a major part of
the early development of rock & roll.
Radio stations that were used to playing Nelson Riddle and Frank Sinatra
were turned off to this new rock & roll, and "colored" music
was unthinkable. That new fellow who was singing rock & roll but sounding
like a colored man, Elvis Presley, was out of the question on their airwaves.
In the '50's when vanilla radio stations around the country were playing
dreary and sanitized music like "Tutti Frutti" by Pat Boone (!),WTIX
in New Orleans was playing it by Little Richard (it was recorded here at
Cosimo's Studio, as were the early hits of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Charles
Brown, etc).
When others played "Earth Angel" by the Crew Cuts, we were playing
it by the Penguins. They played "I Hear You Knocking" by Gale
Storm, while we played it by New Orleans' own Smiley Lewis. They played
"I'm Walkin'" by Ricky Nelson, and we played it by our own Fats
Domino!
While totally segregated musical groups were being force-fed to listeners
on the radio, our legendary New Orleans superstar Frankie
Ford was singing "Sea Cruise," backed by R&B great Huey
"Piano" Smith and giving birth to a milestone song in rock 'nroll.
New Orleans has always been a city of racial diversity, which gives New
Orleans its unique personality and soul. We've always loved and enjoyed
not only our "white" music, but we've always also enthusiastically
loved and enjoyed our music of black origin. After all, it was here where
Jazz was born (Jelly Roll Morton, Buddy Bolden, etc.) and gave us such noted
black musicians as Louis Armstrong. Many of our New Orleans big-band era
singers (Louis Prima, etc.) even adopted the fun style and "scat singing"
of the black musicians.
In the early 1950's when rhythm 'n blues was beginning to merge with the
budding rock & roll, radio stations in most cities tried to surpress
the merge and continued to program only white artists. The record industry
complied by having white singers do (mostly awful) cover recordings of black
hits.
How awful were these forced white group covers of black hits? Just listen
to the Crew Cuts' cover of the Penguins' classic rendition of "Earth
Angel," and hear them singing "Oith Angel, Oith Angel," like
Rocky Balboa singing street corner harmony with the neighborhood loiterers
in Philly. (Apologies to the Crew Cuts..."Sh-Boom", your own song,
was great, but your cover song "Oith Angel" wasn't.) Then think
of Pat Boone on the Ed Sullivan show...scrubbed squeaky clean, a really
short haircut, and dressed in a suit and tie while singing "Tutti Frutti"
straight and snapping his fingers. The world was begging for deliverance
from this embarrassing pap that tried to pass for pop music.
Down South, the winds of change were blowing...
In the early '50's, 1450-AM was occupied by WTPS. It was owned by the New
Orleans Times Picayune-States newspapers ("TP" for Times Picayune,
the morning newspaper, and "S" for the New Orleans States, the
afternoon newspaper, both owned by the same company). WTPS moved to 940-AM,
and 1450 was taken over by newcomer WTIX, playing classical music (!) but
who switched to Top 40 in 1956.
WNOE was the monster Top 40 at the time; WWEZ (690, with legendary DJ
Jack The Cat) and WJBW (1230) were also doing Top 40 along with WTIX. WTIX's
1450 signal obviously could not compete with WNOE's 50 kw, so TIX bought
WWEZ's more desirable 690-AM frequency in 1958. Then it became more of an
evenly matched rivalry. The rest is history.
In the Storz ranks it was the true visionary Tod Storz who saw the excitement
and viability of this new music called rock & roll, and merging black
music with white, especially in New Orleans. He saw to it that WTIX, in
the mid '50's, was the first radio station in America to play the black
versions of the hits, along with all the national hits by Buddy Holly, Elvis,
Jerry Lee Lewis, etc. It was no big thing here to mix the music in a city
that grew up with black music everywhere.
When WTIX before long became one of the most popular and influential radio
stations in the country, other stations took notice. By the beginning of
the '60's, radio stations everywhere had followed in the footsteps of WTIX.
We are fondly remembered for our "chime time"...we rang a chime
whenever we gave the time on the air...and the TIX Tenna Toppers, which
were orange styrofoam balls people stuck on their car radio antennas (remember
car radio antennas?) and hoped to be spotted driving around town and get
prizes.
There were only a handful of stations using the 690 frequency and did we
ever get some calls on the request line from listeners all over the country
on those winter nights when the skip was long. I remember working on Sunday
nights on WTIX and hearing in my headphones the heterodyne from the station
on 690 in Havana under our signal! Being a long-time ham radio operator
and "SWL," that warmed my heart to hear DX coming in under me!
WTIX was a national powerhouse all the way during the AM era of the '50's,
'60's, and '70's, finally losing its punch around 1980 when FM took hold.
But the legend was already etched in stone.
**** (SPECIAL THANKS to Mr. J. Alex Bowab, retired LITE Rock FM station
owner magnate in Mobile, AL, for the WTIX frequency history. He used to
listen to the New Orleans AM stations "via the salt path" as a
kid and was fascinated with them.)