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Transcription: [00:56:02]
{SPEAKER name="Reverend Sam McCrary"}
took one song and put each one the men's picture on it, and everybody wanted that number, because they wanted to, some just want the picture and some want the song. So but that's one thing that helped it to go on and, and be wanted among the congregation.

[00:56:24]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
It's important to just reemphasize as we move on that this was commercial radio. The programming was live from the studios, but it was always with a commercial sponsor. Sponsors which ranged from and could you just mention a few of those who...?

[00:56:41]
{SPEAKER name="Reverend Sam McCrary"}
Well we worked for Finer Flower, we worked at Loveman Clothing Store, we worked for Sunway Vitamin, and we worked for Colonial Coffee. And we would do from 6:15 and then we would start again at 6:45. And one time we was working for Loveman in the evening done at 3:45. We done about 3 programs a day.

[00:57:12]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
So it was traditional music on the radio. The choice of the music ultimately was that of the group and implicitly of the community as they had been chosen by the community. It was commercially sponsored by businesses in the white community who were interested in reaching out to another community and as a result bringing that community's music to the radio for the first time.

[00:57:41]
Mick, the condition was real different I think in the realm of Irish and Irish American music.

[00:57:47]
{SPEAKER name="Mick"}
Well it was and I'm going to hand over to Jack once it comes to 1950 because he was here then and I wasn't. And he can tell ya first hand what it was like in terms of his exposure to ethnic radio in the Irish American context and also his own involvement in it.

[00:58:04]
Before that time I have a little bit of information I suppose. And I say a little bit also well because when you're talking about a widely dispersed community like the Irish Americans you know there are 40 million people in the country now who claim some form of Irish American ancestry.

[00:58:22]
You always have to say that you have a little bit of information about that group because as a group, well it's not really a group it's many groups within that larger aggregation of people.

[00:58:36]
But I talked to some of the real old, old timers people who were involved in ethnic radio stations, people who ran ethnic radio stations, some for over 35 years, and the story emerged to me as this.

[00:58:50]
That Irish ethnic, the Irish ethnic population, was seen as a potential market by the radio stations as indeed were other ethnic populations in America.

[00:59:01]
And that various radio stations offered various blocks of time to people in the Irish community sponsored by various businesses in the community and sometimes outside the community purely on a commercial basis.

[00:59:18]
Now, the people who were running the radio stations were a diverse group of people, you can't say there was any one particular type, but one particular thing they all had to operate under was they had to appeal to the majority of the population. Otherwise, the radio station wouldn't succeed, the sponsors wouldn't, you know, wouldn't pay the advertising money, and this is all a very familiar picture, and one not at all divorced from the realities of commercial television at this particular time.

[00:59:45]
So, independent of the personality or orientation of the person who was running the radio program, certain realities and those realities of commercial appeal were really operative. And the result was that they had to play whatever they thought the community would like.

[01:00:02]
Now, when the radios start, 1920s, 1930s, and continued to the 1940s and so on into the present day, that was at a time in terms of the Irish transition in America, and where radio stations were most popular of course was in the major metropolitan areas, that the Irish were relatively well-assimilated, or acculturated if you want to use the word, along the line, you know that come here in various waves and droves for, they've been coming here for over a hundred and fifty years, and in terms of their relative status among other European immigrant groups, they were fairly well up the ladder.

[01:00:35]
The commercial culture that they identified with for the most part, particularly those people who were not first-generation immigrants, was the culture of commercial America, it was the culture of musical, vaudeville, of tin-pan alley and particularly of the record industry which flowered in the late 1910s, and the twenties and thirties.

[01:00:52]
So that the reality of it was that most Irish American people were buying a synthetic Irish American product which was the creation of tin-pan alley. Mostly songs written by non-Irish people who knew what the ethnic market wanted; themes of nostalgia and separation and so on. Traditional music, the sort of music that this festival here is dedicated to preserving was a very, very, very small component of that whole pantheon, if you wish, of Irish culture in America.

[01:01:22]
As a result, the traditional culture, the jigs and reels, the horn pipes, the old songs; they got totally neglected by ethnic radio. Almost totally.

[01:01:30]
Up to the point when Jack Coyne arrived and maybe Jack can take up the story from 1949 when you arrived and tell us what you were hearing in the Irish radio stations in New York City Jack.

[01:01:40]
Well, there were two radio stations in New York City at that time. And it's like what you described, Mick.

[01:01:48]
You can classify Irish music two ways in New York City or in Ireland alike. There's the commercial Irish music and traditional Irish music. And some of the commercial music claimed to be traditional and they're using the word traditional where it shouldn't be used. It was never used before but now they'll use it if it will help them commercially. So when I came to New York what was you'd hear on the radio was, the radio seemed to work more against tradition than it did any other way.

[01:02:27]
What you would hear on there were a few of the bands who played at the bigger dance halls. And in those times, the dance halls used to get 3-5,000 people there.

[01:02:37]
And it was big business. The people who played in those dance halls were the people who got all the publicity. They weren't the best traditional players, they weren't even classified as good. But as Mick explained to you, they did appeal to the majority of the Irish people because the tradition had gone down. It had gone down to a point that only for a few people it would have been lost completely. If you give head to the radio stations and the publicity that they were giving to the music.

[01:03:11]
That's a hard thing to say and I imagine a lot of people won't like me for that but it is the truth as I know it. And it was much the same back in Ireland before I came out here, the radio, RadioIn [[?]] as they call it, they wouldn't play traditional Irish music and they used the excuse that nobody would listen to it. Well that might be true as they knew it, but as we knew it down through the country it was not true. The people like myself and Mick Maloney who grew up with that, we were always aching to hear some Irish music played on the radio and we heard it very few times.

[01:03:49]
And well it has improved. I think a lot of that can be, the blame can be put on that as Mick says to the people who subsidize those stations and help them to operate, but I think more of the blame can go to the people who ran those stations that were the producers of the program. None of them were musicians or singers and they had no knowledge whatsoever of what was traditional, what was commercial and they were influenced by the people. They used the people to their best advantage like to tell them what they thought and none of them were musicians.

[01:04:33]
For instance, until Mick Maloney came along who was a musician himself and knew traditional music and knew commercial music as he knows it because he plays it himself and understands it. None of us who are playing down here today at this festival he would be here at all. We would never be here tell of it all at all. I can go further like it's back home. I never played on the radio back home when I lived over there and I lived over there until I was 24.

[01:05:05]
And a man came over here to America, Kieran McMahon, Kieran McMahon, in English looking for Irish musicians to record who had usually ones who had kept the tradition alive through the years. And I was recorded by him and after I left there I was played on the radio about 1,000 times if I had been played there once. So it goes to show you how they work. That the right man, you have to have the right man in the right place. That's about all I can say on the subject as I know it.
[01:05:42]