This study is primarily concerned with analyzing the performance technique and cultural significance of the post-World War II black radio disc jockeys who pioneered "personality radio" in the US. I begin by challenging some of the recent literature on the evolution of black-oriented radio which offers only cursory explanations as to how the black radio disc jockey came to define and era in commercial radio broadcasting. My primary concern is to situate the individual verbal performance styles of the black radio personalities, and the cultural institution of "the deejay" that arises from them, within the context of the localization of early radio during the early 1950s. I argue that the undeniable cultural and economic importance black disc jockeys on the whole enjoyed by the early 1950s was the result of a more dynamic confluence of issues both in structural (and ideological) changes in the national corporate broadcast media in general during the 1940s, and in the particular migratory patterns and aesthetic values of black communities as habits of consumption, geographic locations, trends in black popular music, and access to and interest in radio entertainment shifted after World War II.
I begin by explaining how minstrelsy as a whole, from the late 1800s through the turn of the century, shaped popular American impressions of black people and black behavior. I suggest that minstrelsy, in its portrayal of blacks as awkward, laughably illiterate, and generally of bumbling inferiority, established a pattern of images and a language as comic formulae that the white American popular imagination had accepted as entertainment. Early radio entertainment, particularly the popular "Amos 'N' Andy" show, with "racial ventriloquy", necessarily carried these racist, minstrelesque formulae over into the aural blackface of network broadcast radio programming. The tenacity of this system of anti-black entertainment symbolism is an important feature in early radio entertainment, first because it was by these minstrelesque shows that the viability of regularly-scheduled programming was proven, which in turn enticed advertisers and fueled the continually escalating profitability of commercial radio. Second, many of the first black radio personalities during the 1930s and 1940s would struggle, either tacitly or explicitly, over these misrepresentations of black speech and behavior; this second point foreshadows arguments addressed more directly further on in this study -- ideological arguments that arose between disc jockeys over the uses of language in racial-cultural representation.
I then offer a concise historical over-view of the commercial development of American broadcast radio in order to establish the premises from which local radio stations, and the disc jockeys who emerged en masse on these stations, transformed from spaces concerned primarily with entertaining the "greatest common denominator" of the American popular imagination to media outlets scrambling for black listeners. This study traces the changing social significance of radio both in terms of corporate and advertising interests in commercial radio broadcasting, and in terms of the changing entertainment interests of the national audience that set off a chain of events that urged the localization of many radio stations in order to survive. Also, in the relationship between national music publication interests and radio stations soured, local stations found it increasingly convenient to focus instead on more regional music talent that GIs and black migrant workers from the rural South had already begun to popularize in northern and western cities. Out of this confluence of events emerged the disc jockeys who defined personality radio from the late 1940s through the 1960s.
Through an in-depth contextual analysis, this study attempts a more vast and complicated understanding of the black disc jockey, while also positioning itself as part of the growing corpus of important work that is being done around this cultural figure. Because one of the chief premises of this study is that the disc jockey's own particular understanding of the interests, desires, and language of his listening community critically shaped his personality and delivery style, I situate the disc jockey in terms of his "blind" perception of and relationship with his listening community. Then, using verbal performance theory, I analyze the specific techniques of the disc jockeys that resonated deeply with black listeners who held a pre-existing deep aesthetic appreciation for a strong "man-of-words." I trace these aesthetic traditions and verbal performance dynamics from the sacred space of the Black Church as they were invoked in the more secular terrain of the "world of rhythm and blues," especially in black radio, arguing that a dialectic of influence, on the grounds of verbal language and style, between the deejay and the listening allowed deejays to become intimate with his listeners. I then analyze explain how language becomes a contested symbolic terrain and the site of a struggle over racial representation and responsibility in which black disc jockeys engaged one another and the medium, suggesting that radio, due to its aurality, became one more site at which many blacks sought to confront the racist traditions of radio by re-inventing the sound of blackness on the air while others utilized vernacular to counter the historic exclusivity of American radio and carve a massive niche of popularity for the black radio personality. The final chapter discusses speech play and the extra-literal communicative elements inherent in the specific techniques, rhymes and styles of the disc jockeys, explaining that the disc jockeys, in the postures and phrasing of their on-air patter, communicated a sense of style and a connection with their listening communities that was just as important as content (indeed, presentation often preceded content).