The Birth of Golden Oldies

“When did they first start calling them oldies?”

I was riding in the car with my son-in-law Ben Sharpe, who had just changed the radio to “50s on 5.”

He’s so young that he grew up with oldies stations on the radio. And he was wondering when new songs became “oldies.”

I’d never thought about it before but I told him I remembered when I was in junior high hearing WKIN deejay Gary Morse refer to “moldy oldies” and Gary was making fun of what was already commonplace: an old song being called a “golden oldie.”

That was in the early sixties.

So rock and roll had been around less than a decade and already they were pulling golden oldies from the vault.

I told Ben there weren’t entire stations devoted to oldies but they did occasionally interrupt the Top 40 for a golden oldie.

Later I remembered a “moldy oldie” about “moldy oldies.” There was a hit during my junior high years called “Those Oldies But Goodies Remind Me Of You” by Little Caesar and the Romans.

I looked it up and it was a hit in 1961. (Also Little Caesar’s real name was Carl Burnett.)

So if we arbitrarily select 1954 as the year that rock and roll began – that’s the year that Danny and the Juniors released “Rock Around the Clock” – then rock was only seven years old and already Little Caesar was crooning about Oldies (but Goodies).

But oldies, in reference to music, goes back much further than that.

In 1942 WNOX-AM in Knoxville advertised a show called “Saturday Nite Serenade:” “Bill and Jessica revive the oldies…and insert a couple of sparkling new songs.”

Oldies in 1942!

And if they were calling them oldies in the newspaper in 1942 then they surely go back even further.

XXX

Gary Morse was my idol when I was in seventh grade. I went to church with him – Bethel Presbyterian – and he was already working as a disc jockey when he was in ninth grade. WKIN-AM made him the first teenager playing music on Kingsport radio for other teenagers.  

Gary wasn’t the first radio announcer to play a rock and roll record in Kingsport. Chuck Foster was playing rock and roll on WKIN-AM’s “Boogie and Blues” and “Jive at Five” shows as early as 1955.

But Gary was the first member of the rock and roll generation, the kids who grew up on rock and roll, to work as a deejay on a local station.

Gary started spinning discs on WKIN in 1959, when he was just 14 years old. And he had been hanging around the station for three years before that, fetching coffee, learning the ropes.

He was still a student at Robinson when he took over the afternoon music show at WKIN. He’d cut out immediately after school, riding his motorcycle down to the station, which at the time was on the corner of Market and Wexler streets.

In fact, Gary didn’t just ride to work, he rode into work, with other station employees opening the doors for him so he could ride all the way into the studio, hop off his bike and turn on the mike.

For the next hour or two – WKIN signed off at sunset which varied by the season – “Bouncin’ Gary,” as he called himself, was in the “snake pit,” which is what he called the studio, spinning those stacks of wax. All rock and roll, all the time.

And occasionally throwing in a “moldy oldie.”