I grew up in a lily-white, German-Lutheran farm town in central Michigan. Music in my family was either church music, or polka, and I must admit that I know more polkas than someone my age should probably know. Every Saturday morning, the “Saturday Polka Show” hosted by Marv Herzog on WSGW radio out of Saginaw played loudly in our house. Which brings me to the real topic of this post; at the beginning of the institute, Dr. Early spoke about the ‘mythology” of white kids listening to black radio stations and getting turned on to Motown and James Brown etc.. I’m here to say, that for me, the myth is rooted in reality.
In 1968, I received my first transistor radio, with the mono, white earphone. This was fortuitous as the Detroit Tigers had a stellar season which culminated in a victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. At night, I would go to bed on the top bunk, and surreptitiously stick the antenna out past the window screen to listen to the night games. In my explorations around the radio dial, I discovered WSAM, also out out of Saginaw, and this radio station was playing music that I’d never heard before. The Jackson 5, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and the list goes on and on. Soon, I was trying to get my cousins in on the act, and we would tune in WSAM, or on a great night, pick up WLS out of Chicago, and fight over singing along with the Jackson 5 about who got to “be” Michael. So for some of us, especially in small-town, white America, black radio stations and the transistor radio became our ‘window’ on a world wider than “The Beer-barrel Polka”.
-- Loren Preuss
