Get in touch!

In 1920, a radio signal was a rumor with electricity behind it — a handful of amateurs in garages and attics, broadcasting into a void nobody had proven was listening. There were no networks, no formats, no rules, because nobody in power had figured out yet that there was anything here worth controlling. That's the world this episode opens in: the accidental birth of American radio, before it belonged to anyone.

"Hello, World" traces how a scattered hobby became a national voice — and sets up the argument this whole series is built on: American freedom tends to live in the places nobody's bothered to claim yet. Episode one of Signal, a new American Song series on the rise, fall, and strange afterlife of American radio, is live now.

In this episode:

• Robert Baden Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts) talks to parents
• KDKA Pittsburgh. 11/2/1920. First Commercial Radio Broadcast
• W.K. (Old Man) Henderson - Hello World (1930)
• KPBS Classics - Ballad of an Unsung Hero
• Father Couglin - 12/11/1938
• The Amos 'n Andy Show - Courtroom Catastrophe
• Orson Welles - War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast (1938)
• FDR Fireside Chat on Banking
• Edward R. Murrow - The London Blitz

And here's what comes next:

Radio didn’t stay innocent for long. Neither did anyone, really.

A man invents FM radio, and the company profiting from it steals it out from under him and leaves him with nothing. For thirty years after that, nobody wants what he built. Turns out neglect was the best thing that could’ve happened to it — because ignored is free, and free is where a DJ can play whatever he wants, for as long as it deserves to be heard, with nobody telling him otherwise. That part is genuinely glorious. It’s also, like most glorious things, temporary.

Because eventually somebody in Washington signs a piece of paper almost nobody reads, and in a few short years radio stops belonging to the people who loved it and starts belonging to a balance sheet. Local voices get replaced with automation. One January morning, a chemical disaster hits a small town, and the station legally required to warn people doesn’t answer the phone — because there’s nobody left inside to answer it. That’s not a metaphor. That’s what corporate greed actually costs.

The people radio pushed out never stopped loving it. They rebuilt it somewhere else — podcasts, Substack, stations run by people who remember what this was supposed to sound like. Something America loved got taken away by greed, and then, quietly and stubbornly, brought back from the ashes by the people who never let go of it.

That’s also an American pattern. It happened to jazz. It happened to punk. Over the next six episodes, we watch it happen to radio.