On labor Day Weekend I participated in one of the numerous New Mexico festivals. Bands played throughout the day, and I found it interesting that so much classic rock was played - hit songs from the 1950s and 1960s. I was a part of that era in that I was a disc jockey from 1949 until 1974.

Today nearly every major city has at least one station that plays the Golden Oldies, hit songs from that period. Today they are played by young people who were not even born when the songs were first recorded. Reading from notes assembled for them by some rock historian, they tell you a lot about the artists and the songs. Things we never knew when we introduced the records to our listeners.

There were no CDs in those days. We played 78 rpm records until about 1953, then 45s and 33 1/3 rpm albums. Many of our commercials were read live, others were recorded on acetate disks. By the mid-60s, commercials were recorded on tape cartridge. Usually we worked with four turntables and every record had to be "cued".

Many times we also had to read our own five-minute newscasts and weather reports during our show. And, we had to maintain a Program Log, recording the time of every commercial, every station identification. We did not just sit and listen to the music! We were so busy that in some cases we never really heard the lyrics of a song. Today I occasionally hear a record that I first played on the air some 50 years ago and I will ask my wife if that lyric is the same as on the original recording.

Sometimes the lyrics were actually changed. On Jimmy Dean's "Big Bad John", he originally ended the song with the line, "at the bottom of this mine lies a hell of a man, Big John." But, a lot of radio stations refused to play the record so he re-recorded the ending, saying, "at the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man... Big John."