DYKYC?: The Birth of Rock and Roll In Charleston

About four blocks away from where this is written is the husk of WQSN, its once regal tower now rusting in the pluff mud. The remarkable sounds of three WZ no longer waft from those boss Pioneer speakers. Buzz no longer regales us with stories of little known information of very little use save to chuckle on the way to work.
WTMA –AM (Tiger Radio) is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Today Richard Todd and Rocky-D rule the local talk radio scene from fancy studios off 526, but I remember when one of the Swanson boys threw a firecracker through the open window of the studio at the Dock Street Theatre. Doug Randall and Booby Nash were fixtures as prevalent as the Shirelles and Curtis Mayfield.
I was fortunate enough to be the last local boy to have a show on drive-time local talk radio. I was on TMA when NAACP boycott story broke. Later when writing this column seven or eight years ago, I began to compile people’s memories of the media.
John Quincy, an institution of Charleston radio since 1981, began to scour the ether for all things TMA. Go to http://www.wtmamemories.com/. Take the time to do it. The site is an absolute gem. There is a special place in heaven for John.
I was humbled to find my columns about radio memories amid the cooler stuff. I had occasion to peruse them and came across one from my friend, the late, great Walker Coleman.
Walker wrote, “One day in the spring of ‘55, I overheard some older schoolmates whispering and snickering about the audacious new “Hound Dog” show on radio station WTMA which played music so raunchy that you had to listen on the sneak. I vicariously tuned in the following Saturday evening at 10:00 pm and was both surprised and delighted to experience the joyous, uplifting Rhythm and Blues music I had heard earlier in my childhood on station WDIA in Memphis, Tennessee. Here it was prominently accompanied by a hoarse voiced disk jockey, Jack Gale, screaming in at the top of his lungs while drums furiously pounded and a hound dog periodically let loose horny howls and moans at the moon. Many of the songs definitely were raunchy-especially the Annie series and almost anything else by the Midnighters as well as “Baby Don’t Drop It”, “Rocket 69″ as well as others. These tunes were interspersed with some of the most outrageous commercials imaginable, many in jive rhymes. One I recall, even today, was for a shoe store where you could get your basic ‘leopard skin shoes with purple lizard gizzard laces that glowed in the dark.’
“Hound Dog exuded an irreverent attitude that every red-blooded wannabe teenage rebel could adopt as their own since it was guaranteed to totally repulse their parental units. The show quickly became mandatory for many of my contemporaries–and, yes, most of us had to keep the radio volume way down or use other subterfuges such as overnights with friends to fake out disapproving parents, many of whom actually forbade offspring from listening to this “crude music”. Often we even managed to stay awake all the way until 2:00 am sign off. I later learned that Gale was the overall WTMA Station Manager and experimenting at the time with several different broadcast formats to improve ratings. I can remember Gale telling us one night that the music he played would henceforth be called ‘Rock and Roll’ by him and many of his fellow DJs.
“I joined the official Hound Dog fan club and still have a square bumper sticker with its black border encompassing a bright orange circle in which a crudely rendered white canine with black spots musically howls; ‘I’m a Rock & Roll Hound Dog’. This was secured at Carolina Instrument Service on upper King which sold the records played on the show, and which we called the ‘Hound Dog Record Shop.”
“The Hound Dog show experiment on WTMA was over by year’s end, however. Other local stations had started regularly programming the music and I would listen each evening and morning to “A Train” on WUSN and then spend the afternoons and Saturday mornings at WPAL with Big Bob Nichols’ “Blues and Boogie Show” as he would sophisticatedly articulate “I can see you out there”. In fact, for the next several years the radio at East Bay Playground was tuned to this show every afternoon and Nichols himself often broadcast live on Saturday mornings from the front window of Fox Music House on upper King where one day he was visited by none other than Augusta, Georgia, neighbor James Brown and his Famous Flames who arrived in their equipment saturated, eight-door, stretch white Chevy limousine with bright flames painted all along the sides. By now there was even a local television show playing some R & B, the late evening Talent Parade hosted by eloquent D. Jack Moses.
“Later we expanded our “must-listen” list with station WAPE (“Big Ape”) received directly over the Atlantic from Jacksonville, Florida. This list was finally rounded off in the late ’50s with pirate Station WXERF beamed illegally from the Mexican border side of Del Rio, Texas where Wolfman Jack was just getting started, and had the most outrageous of all the shows ever heard prior to the current day array of crude radio morning personalities.”
As they are wont to say on Facebook, I’d like to continue this thread. What are your memories?