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Wim's avatar

Great article - thanks. Whenever I hear, e.g., “Green Onions” I think, damn, why doesn’t anybody do this anymore?

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Scott Sanger's avatar

For many years during the 50s and 60s the song played last in each hour on Top-40 radio was an instrumental. These stations did not have their own news departments, so news reports at the top of the hour came from national broadcasters (e.g., the Mutual Broadcasting Network). It was far too much trouble to time the song prior to the news handoff to end precisely at 59:59 and awkward to truncate a vocal performance before the song’s end. The solution was to end the hour with an instrumental, allowing the DJ to talk over the song (‘… that does it from me, but Johnny Dark will take over, right after the news’) and for the engineer to fade it out as the news report began.

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