1945-1946 New Year's Eve Radio Dance Party

This week on Big Band Bash I'll be playing a show that I bought on vinyl records many years ago. The Armed Forces Radio Network was a different network than the AM and FM radio bands. It mostly operated on short wave. Many radio shows were edited and then broadcast for our fighting men during World War II. On News Year's Eve 1945-1946 special hookups were arranged in the cities where 16 different name bands were performing. Thus the AFRS broadcast the bands starting at 11:00 EST. They would broadcast one song from each band and then go to a different city featuring a different band. Luckily for us this was preserved. If you want to hear this show you can find it at that great web site archives.org.

Back when I was first listening to old radio shows and jazz artists, the only way for me to find new shows was from the records put out by companies like Radiola, Mark 6, etc. Or I would tape them off the air. With the advent of cassette tapes I was able to buy radio shows from a company called the Radio Vault. Now that everyone , well lots of people, are posting items to the internet there is an abundance of shows. In fact I have collected so many in MP3 format that I'll never be able to listen to them all.

Tune in to KYXK 91.5 in the Texarkana area for this weeks program. You can also subscribe to our podcast in through ITunes. Search for Big Band Bash.

Christmas Eve 1941

Christmas Eve 1941 is a special day in American History. We were only 14 days from the horrific attack on Pearl Harbor. This was the first Christmas that we were celebrating since we entered the War. At the capital, FDR was entertaining Winston Churchill.  They became fast friends and stayed up late drinking brandy. On this christmas eve both FDR and Churchill gave a speech. The audio is a little hard to listen to as it was recorded outside.

There are not many recordings that have survived from that date. There is an Amos and Andy Christmas show and a Glenn Miller Chesterfield show that has survived but not much else. Big Band Bash has a couple of excerpts  on he program. One is from  NPR and the other is from historian and author David McCullough. I hope you get a chance to listen to it but if not you can listen at KTXK.org or better yet you can subscribe to the podcast.

Big Band Bash on ITunes

I've been busy since the last blog post setting up my podcast at the Apple Itunes store. It is an interesting process and I've learned alot. I've been producing Big Band Bash for the last 7 years and have acquired about 210 shows. I have a web site hosted with fat Cow so I uploaded about 15 shows into a directory there. Then you have to have a graphic so I got one from the net and cropped it and added some text. Apple recommends that these be 300 x 300 in size.  The hardest part was the rss feed. This is the document that tells all about your podcasts. I found a template on the net and then changed it up to suit my podcast. Lastly you have to submit your rss feed url to apple. If it is all good then you'll get an email saying that they received your podcast and they are reviewing it.  Then it took about 3 days for Apple to say everything was good and to send me the address of the podcast in the Apple store. I don't know if anyone will listen but I'm having fun producing the podcasts and learning the Apple way of  Itunes podcasting.

Here is the link to the Big Band Bash podcast at the Itunes store: 
Big Band Bash podcast
Big Band Bash Podcast

Welcome to Big Band Bash

Every week I put together a one hour program that is broadcast on KTXK 91.5 Texarkana Texas. I have been broadcasting here for 26 years in some form or another. About five years ago the station manager asked me to put together a program to run on Saturday night featuring music of the Big bands. So far I have produced 203 of these programs. I am a saxophonist and have played in big bands for many years so producing a radio program featuring big band music was a dream come true. I am just starting this blog and will continue to develop it as I have time. I hope to post links to some of the shows that I have done at my hosting site with a goal of publishing these on ITunes.