Radio Station Jingles: 80 Years of Earworms

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You're listening to 20,000 hertz.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

I spent a lot of my formative years listening to the radio.

And while today's streaming apps are really convenient, I do find myself missing those over-the-top, super epic radio IDs.

Power 96.1.

Power

has a

power 961.

Cool OGs for your work date.

Cool 105.

We love all your country.

Country 94.5.

KFKF

LA's number one.

Hit

Radio IDs are essentially sonic signatures for radio stations.

That's producer and sound strategist Gina Isham, who's also the host of the Sound and Marketing podcast.

Just like music itself, ID jingles have evolved over the decades.

Each one is a cultural and historical snapshot of the time and place it was created.

And the origin of these little melodies goes all the way back to the early 1900s.

When radio was first invented, it was basically telegraph signals, and it was mostly used for ships at sea to be able to communicate with stations on land.

That's Jonathan Wolfert, who has over 50 years of experience making radio IDs.

And when you're using Morse code, you want your message to be as concise as possible.

So rather than taking the time to spell out the name of a long ship, they started using abbreviations.

So these ships would be assigned call letters.

In 1912, it was decided by all the nations nations that the various letters of the alphabet should be assigned to different countries.

The United States ended up with the W's,

Ks,

A's,

and the N's.

Canada got some of the Cs, Mexico got some of the X's, and so forth.

Then, as commercial radio started taking off, they applied this same system to radio stations.

The Department of Commerce decided that the radio stations to the east of the Mississippi River would be licensed with W call letters.

We are broadcasting over WAAM,

and this comes to you direct from the Edison studios.

And the stations to the west of the Mississippi would have K call letters.

This is KGEI General Electric Station, San Francisco, California.

But soon enough, they ran into a problem.

Radio grew very quickly starting in the 1920s and before long there were hundreds of different stations and it was hard for people to really know what station they were listening to.

These stations realized that simply stating their name just wasn't memorable enough.

It became advantageous to do some catchy, musical, jingly thing to get the attention of the audience and have something that's a little more identifiable.

One of the first stations to adopt a jingle ID was New York's WJZ in the early 40s.

Now back then, due to limits in technology, almost everything you heard on the radio was live.

That was the era where stations had live bands and live performers and live shows.

But at nighttime, WJZ started playing pre-recorded music, which made them ahead of their time.

And since the DJs were off the clock, they'd occasionally drop in jingles like this to remind listeners what they were hearing.

All night long, we bring you a song, a night of melody.

To rootle

on WJZ.

There's a smile upon your dial at 7-17.

WJZ.

This was right around the time that the U.S.

entered World War II.

There were a lot of night shift workers because all of the plants and factories were going around the clock.

And you can hear that reflected in one of these jingles that WJZ ran in the middle of the night to salute those night shift workers.

24

hours a day are working hours for the USA.

Respectfully, we dedicate this song

to you who worked the whole

night

long.

It's kind of haunting and scary all at the same time.

The Axis is listening.

Shh,

don't talk.

Certainly very different from what you hear today on the radio in the way of jingles.

WJ-Z

New York.

But it wasn't until after the war that these jingles really took off.

The real history of the radio jingle business began in Dallas in 1947 when a guy named Gordon McClendon put on a radio station with the name KLIF.

At some point,

they decided that they should use the talent that was there doing these live shows to sing a little commercial for the sponsors of the show.

It gave them the idea that, well, maybe they should record a little commercial for the station itself.

And so they started making jingles for KLIF.

These jingles gave the station a fun and memorable sonic identity, and they were also useful for programming.

Even during the live shows, if they had to switch from one studio to another, or if one show ended a little early or something and they needed something to fill up the time, they could always go to one of these pre-recorded jingles and by themselves 30 seconds or a minute.

It's wonderful, summer radio,

KLIF

in Dallas.

One of the jingle makers at KLIF was a man named Bill Meeks.

After a few years, Bill Meeks thought, you know, maybe there's a business here.

Maybe there are other radio stations around who do not have access to these live performers.

And so he left and in August of 1951, he started his company, Pam's.

PAMS stands for Production, Advertising, Merchandising Service.

Here's one of their early jingles.

Bill Meeks wasn't the only one who wanted to take advantage of the musical talent in Dallas.

Rival companies formed and soon Dallas became the radio jingle capital of the world.

In the early years, one trend was to use a device called the Sonavox.

It's a way to make an instrument or a sound effect of some sort appear to be talking.

The Sonavox was invented in 1939.

It involves two handheld speakers that you hold up to your throat.

Then you form words with your mouth, which shapes the sound into something like speech.

In Disney's Dumbo, they used a sonavox to make the voice of the train whistle.

All aboard, let's go.

Pam's really pioneered doing that, and a couple of examples of what that sounds like are some of the first ones that they did for KFWB in Los Angeles.

When crafting these jingles, Pam's was also paying attention to what the kids were up to.

In the 50s, a lot of young couples going out on dates would try to go find some dark, secluded place so that they could turn off the car and snuggle, shall we say.

And that idea wound up in this hilarious jingle.

Let's park.

It's kind of dark.

And see the view.

The view, I'm watching you.

Hold hands.

That fits my plans.

I go for you.

Move toward me and you're through.

I'll turn on the radio.

See what we miss.

Who could resist?

I simply love WMPS in the moonlight.

Grade 68, WMPS,

WMPS grade 68.

That is so 50s that I love it.

As you can hear, John has a lot of nostalgia for these old radio jingles.

You get to hear how things changed and evolved, not just musically, but lyrically as well.

And it's just kind of fun to relive those eras in these short little songs like that.

That passion is how John first found his calling.

I grew up in the New York City area.

During the 1960s, there were two radio stations that I heard most of the time.

One of them was WNEW, which my parents liked to listen to because it played all the standards, all the Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett kind of big band music.

There's only

one

W

and I W.

I, being much younger, wanted to listen to WABC because it was the top 40 rock and roll station.

77,

WABC.

And I noticed these little songs where somebody was singing about the radio stations.

77

music WABC.

Even as a 10-year-old kid, I said, well, who are those people?

And where did that come from?

And then one fateful day, I was listening.

on the AM radio band to out-of-town stations from Buffalo and Cleveland and Chicago and other places, and I started to hear the same jingles.

7D7WAB SUR,

but with different words, different call letters, but it was clearly the same jingle.

790WAKY

WGH Best Sound Indexy

Spending the weekend with WAYS.

Channel 91, WCXI.

This completely flipped my switch.

And it was like, well,

who's doing this?

And can I possibly start collecting these things just to compare them and have them?

It turns out these variations all came back to the radio jingle juggernaut Pam's, who produced WABC's signature jingles.

At one time, WABC New York was the most listened-to radio station in North America.

And you would find stations in every city you went to that wanted to sound like WABC.

These stations could go to Pam's and commission custom versions of these hit jingles, but with their unique call letters.

Pams did that in such a way that stations all over America copied what WABC was doing.

And it went beyond just America.

During the 60s, Pam's was unquestionably the top jingle producer in the world and stations everywhere were using Pam's jingles.

Mexico City, the London Sound,

Consuper Musica.

John wanted to be part of creating that shared experience.

Most young guys who are interested in recording or music, they want to work in a studio.

They want to record bands.

And I, on the other hand, wanted to work at this one specific place

because what I wanted to make was this one specific thing, these jingles.

Eventually, that dream led him to Pam's.

So by perseverance and good fortune, I was actually able to get a job at Pam's and I did that for several years.

And then one thing led to another and my wife and I decided to start our own company, which is called called Jam Creative Productions.

Jam stands for John and Mary Lynn.

The two of us actually competed with Pam's for several years.

Jam immediately hit the ground running and soon enough they got a call from a familiar station.

After we had been in business officially less than a year, we got this call from WABC, which is the station I grew up with that got me interested in all this in the first place.

The guy at WABC called up and said, well, we're having trouble finding the kind of jingles that we need.

Would you like to do some stuff for WABC?

And I'm thinking, yeah, I could probably work them in.

You know, this is like the biggest deal ever, the full circle of being the guy who was 10 years old hearing the jingles on that station and becoming the guy making the jingles for that station.

So we started doing jingles for WABC in 1975.

Music Radio, WABC.

And we're still doing jingles for WABC.

You can still hear our stuff on the air there all these years later.

York City.

Working at Pam's and then Jam, John was at the forefront of the changing trends in radio.

Radio got a lot more researched and scientific, and the result of that was that radio stations started using shorter and shorter jingles.

For example, this is how long it took one radio station to introduce the weather forecast in the late 50s.

Here's how they introduced weather 10 years later.

KFRC weather.

As the years went on, they cut cut them down even further.

They would just have what is known as a shotgun jingle, which is a very fast, frantic drum intro, and then the call letters are sung, and that's it.

Early on, Jam even made a shotgun jingle that used a classic Sonavox effect.

Listen for the robotic effect on the W.

W.

Then, in 1977, Jam started getting a particular request.

At the time, everybody was in a Star Wars kind of a frame of mind and everything needed to have little laser bursts in it.

And so we did a very, very short jingle with a little laser effect on the front and some brass and the call letters.

And they used it all the time.

WABC.

That jingle has been used by radio stations everywhere.

There are hundreds of versions of that jingle.

And it's just because it's so functional.

WPGC,

Radio One,

Boosted Aruba,

Grand Yu Jomin Bar.

But while Jam was adapting to these changes, by the mid-70s, Pam's founder, Bill Meeks, was struggling.

He decided that the company needed to diversify because he kind of lost faith in the jingle business and it just became a bunch of bad business decisions that spelled the end of the original Pams.

Pams suspended operations in 1978.

Then in 1990, Jam bought the Pams Corporation and all of its copyrights.

So now we are Pams as well.

And we're still here all these years later.

Since then, Jam has produced thousands more radio IDs for stations across the U.S.

and around the world.

In 2024, they celebrated their 50th anniversary with this playful meta jingle.

It's time for celebration and self-congratulation.

It's a golden year.

50 years of jam.

We've sun station after station all across the nation and around the world.

50 years of jam.

Over the years, Jam has inspired other jingle heads to get in the game themselves.

John Wolford is probably the reason I'm in this business.

And wherever popular music goes, radio ID jingles are always close behind.

That's coming up after the break.

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Radio ID jingles started in the 1940s and really took off when companies like Pam's and eventually Jam hit the scene.

Just like pop songs, these jingles are little time capsules of the era they were made in.

For instance, you can practically feel the 80s dripping off these radical jam jingles.

Radio 1.

KKH

C-100.

Hot gun in the summertime.

It's hot hits.

It's during that decade that we meet our next Radio Jingle Maestro, Eric Huber.

At the time, Eric was interning at a Seattle radio station, working on some jingles for them.

And the programmer for that station walked in and handed me a CD D with all of Jam's then current Radio ID jingle offerings.

Maximum music.

K-H-T-R.

And it blew my doors off, man.

I mean, as far as the craftsmanship, the musicality, and just the overall excitement of the presentation, man, it was a work of art.

And so my hat is off to John Wolford because I think he set the bar for what Radio IDs could be.

And he's obviously an incredibly talented guy.

Cut to a few years later in the early 90s.

Eric and his friend Steve Thomas want to produce pop songs, but they're having trouble.

Unfortunately, we weren't really able to get traction on the artist development and songwriting side of things.

Meanwhile, the musical landscape is rapidly changing.

This was a really interesting time for pop music because Grunge was crossing over to the mainstream.

And hip-hop music was crossing over to the mainstream.

I can vividly remember where I was the very first time I heard nothing but a G-thing by Dr.

Drake.

The rise of these new genres meant new radio stations.

And since Eric already had some experience with radio jingles, we thought there was an opportunity to do something in this genre in terms of an ID jingle package.

So Eric and Steve formed a company called Real World Productions.

To show off what they could do, they created a package of jingles for WPGC, which was a huge hip-hop and R ⁇ B station in Washington, D.C.

We actually reached out to some of the artists that we were working with on the R ⁇ B hip-hop side of things, brought them into the studio and recorded this jingle package on spec.

On spec is when you produce something before any contracts have been signed.

In other words, it's a proof of concept.

We just produced this thing for free and literally called up Jay Stevens, who was programming the station, and said, hey, we want to do this.

Are you willing to give it a listen?

Here are a few of the jingles they sent.

As you can hear, they perfectly capture the sound and vibe of 90s hip-hop and RB.

WPGC liked what they heard and Real World was off to the races.

Soon after, they landed a gig with another station called Cube.

And the sound of the station was just a little more poppy and upbeat, so the package shifted more in that direction.

More on sort of the techno-housey side of things.

Sometimes these jingles were directly inspired by a particular artist or song.

Yeah, that's the ace of bass cut.

For companies like Eric's, it's a fine line to walk.

We're also not necessarily wanting to be too derivative or to be too specific to a particular song or a particular era.

Because I don't want to make a jingle that's going to burn in five minutes.

And then it's like, oh, this is the ace of bass.

Kind of sounds so dated, you know?

So there's kind of a dance that we're doing there, trying to predict where the format is heading and what the sound of the format will be in six months or a year.

When Real World makes a package of radio jingles, say for a country station, they might start with one that's more rocking.

985

KYGO.

Then they might make a version that's a little more laid-back and nostalgic.

98-5,

K-Y-G-O.

Maybe they know that the station's listeners are fans of the show Hell on Wheels, which has a stomping down and dirty-sounding theme song.

So they craft a jingle that evokes that same vibe.

For a weather alert, they might make something with a bit of a breaking news flair to it.

And for contests and giveaways, they might make something more poppy and celebratory.

For every single package they create, Real World makes around 50 to 80 individual pieces of music.

And when you broaden it out to different languages and countries, the stylistic variations become even more pronounced.

Now, typically the people singing these jingles are professional studio vocalists, but there are some exceptions, like the package Real World made for a sports station back in 1999.

They wanted a sort of sports chant, something that could be imagined as a crowd at an arena getting hyped up.

So I came up with the idea of using my own voice and stacking it up about 50 times.

And to match the energy of a wild sports fan at a game.

I literally had to drink Red Bull and take my shirt off and get pretty jacked up.

So it was a lot of work.

Sports Radio!

Sports Radio 950!

J-R-A-M!

K-J-R-A-M-C-L.

It's like it's dripping with masculinity.

On the more wholesome side of things, Real World also does holiday jingles.

Adult contemporary stations, in particular, will typically transition to 100% Christmas music, holiday music in November and December.

That is often when these stations are doing their highest billing.

And so, for a station like Coast, where the Christmas programming is such a big deal, they really want to sell the idea that Coast is your go-to for Christmas music.

The Christmas programming is sort of a special time when you're playing music for the sake of nostalgia that would not show up on the radio station the rest of the year.

And capturing that nostalgia can sometimes mean evoking a specific holiday staple.

Here's Bobby Helms' classic Jingle Bell rock.

As it plays, we'll gradually fade it over to a Coast ID called Jingle Swing.

Jingle

In any good piece of sonic branding, nostalgia is one of the most powerful ingredients.

And radio IDs are no different.

People associate these little tunes with different times in their lives and the different places that they've lived.

They stick in our heads for years.

And when we hear these melodies again, those memories come flooding back.

And that's part of why these jingles are still used by so many stations around the world today.

I think radio station ID jingles are going to continue to be used as long as there's radio stations, really.

Not by every station, but by some stations that really want to make an impact.

And fortunately for those stations, there are still people like John and Eric who live and breathe these jingles.

I chose to be in the jingle production business because it combines all of my interests.

Radio, music, electronics, recording.

I'm having a good time doing it, and that's why I'm still here.

I feel so blessed to be able to apply my craft as a musician, composer, producer in a realm where creativity is valued and where that creativity forges an emotional bond.

Through music, we have the ability to create joy and to create emotional experiences for listeners.

And I'd like to think that in some small way, the world is better off because we're out here in the studio, you know, cranking out ID jingles.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Hear more at de facto sound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Gina Isham.

And Casey Emmerling.

With help from Grace East.

It was Sound Design and Mixed by Justin Hollis.

And Jade Dickey.

Thanks to our guests, John Wolfert and Eric Huber.

To learn more about their work, just follow the links in the show notes.

Finally, Gina hosts her own podcast about all things sonic branding.

It's called Sound and Marketing, and you can listen and follow right here in your podcast player.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.