A city sleeps but the lights stay on.

People often wonder if radio in the 1940s and 1950s was anything like Television during that time. If you stayed up late enough and were groggily staring at your TV, you would invariably see a Test pattern, an announcer reciting the script from the FCC, the Star Spangled Banner and a drone of static. That was TV in the early days.

Radio wasn’t so much the case – after all the network shows had ended, it was down to the individual stations to opt carrying on with programming or call it a night and be back somewhere around 5.

Late night radio in the 1940s and 1950s was a lot different than it became in later years. At the time of this broadcast, from KVFD in Los Angeles; a station which has long gone off the air or morphed into something else, the date was June 25, 1951 and the program was called, appropriately enough, Dreamtime – it ran for one hour, Monday through Friday from 1 am to 2 am. The announcer, George Sanders had a voice that would stop insomnia dead in its tracks and offer some words of wisdom that could be misconstrued as subliminal messaging or self-hypnosis.

With all the calm lulling that seems to be prevalent with these shows, it’s a wonder there weren’t more early morning accidents on L.A. freeways or work productivity on the parts of swing shifts was dropping to practically nothing during the midnight to six hours.

KFVD was a popular radio station in Los Angeles at the time – it morphed into KGBS and eventually became KTNQ before finally settling on becoming an all Spanish station. But as KVFD it was offering a little bit of everything and its audience was wide.

As a reminder, the music played on this program is what we were listening to in 1951. Although becoming a pioneer in Rhythm & Blues record spinning later on in the 1950s, in 1951 it was straightforward pop, so you get an idea what our musical offerings were all about before Rock n’ Roll came to the rescue.

Here is a half-hour of a one hour show, as heard over KFVD in Los Angeles on the early morning of June 25, 1951.

No one will mind if you fall asleep while listening to this – that’s what it was for.

The post While A City Sleeps – L.A. Radio In The Wee Small Hours – 1951 -Past Daily Gallimaufry appeared first on Past Daily: A Sound Archive of News, History And Music.