Radio's Payola Scandal - The Real Story

In the mid 1950s an event in radio broadcasting became known as the Payola Scandal. Deejays were alleged to have played records for pay, without informing their listeners they were being paid.

At the peak of the reporting, a teenage girl lamented that she had bought a record because her deejay said it was a hit, but she now hears that he only said that for pay. What a crock.

Here is what the scandal boiled down to. In the 1950s, everyone was trying to make a hit record. A teenage garage band would create a song, play it until they liked it a lot, then convince parents to bankroll a recording session and an initial pressing of the record. The disk then went on consignment to some record distributor who tried to promote it.

He would also be trying to promote records produced by more experienced artists and producers, some of which were really good. But when a promoter walked into the studio and handed a deejay 25 or 30 records, no one knew which was which.

I liked the promotion men who visited the station. They were good guys, doing a tough job. One day a promoter named Myron Levy gave me a real gift... an advance copy of a record by a guy called Little Willie John. Dated April 30, 1956, it was the first copy of the record to hit Kansas City. I was to have exclusive play until copies arrived for other deejays in the city. On one side was a song titled "Letter From My Darling". The flip side was called "Fever". The promoter thought "Letter" was the hit side.

At this point, you have to understand that we were called "Disk Jockeys" because we spent our entire show shuffling records around. There was the music, on little 45s. All commercials were recorded on 33 1/3 rpm, 12" acetate disks, as were station ID jingles, news, weather and sports intros, contest intros, promos for other things happening on the station, etc. We worked with four turntables and every disk had to be "cued" in preparation for air play. That is, each record was placed on a turntable and the stylus placed in the first groove. The output was switched to an off-the-air "cue" amplifier and the turntable rotated by hand until the sound started. The record was then turned backwards, one-quarter turn past the very start of the sound, the turntable output switched back to an on-the-air channel and the turntable set to the correct speed for that record. When it was time to play that record. you just hit the switch to start the turntable, brought the gain up and the audio started almost immediately. When any record finished playing on the air, the record was snatched off the turntable and replaced by the next recording to be played in the sequence.

And, of course, you had to be aware of what you were going to say on the air between all these events... comment on a song, read the weather, a traffic report, read news or sports headlines, do a live tag for a recorded commercial. At the end of a three hour shift, you were exhausted.

We did not really have a chance to listen to everything we played. To this day I occasionally hear a record I introduced on the air some 50 years ago. I hear a lyric I do not remember, and ask my wife if that lyric was on the original record. Usually she says it was.

Back to Little Willie John. I started including "Letter to My Darling" in a segment devoted to new records. Some days after my exclusive possession of that record had expired, I discovered I had been playing the wrong side and "Fever" became a big hit.

In December, 1955, I received a letter from Johnny Cash, thanking me for listing his first record and asking me to play his second record.


I have no idea why I initially saved that letter. It probably got shuffled in with other papers and was saved accidentally. Later, I found and read it, and have saved it since because Cash was promoting the wrong side of his own record. "Folsom" became a hit. I doubt you can find anyone today who remembers "So Doggone Lonesome".

In December, 1955, neither Johnny Cash, "So Doggone Lonesome" or "Folsom Prison Blues" meant squat to me. Cash had had one record at that time, and a decent one. That's all.

So, when the record promoter walked in and gave you 25 new records. On his heels, another promoter gave you 25 more new records, you were overwhelmed. How could you listen to all those records... both sides? Would a single listen tell you much about the recording?

One day a promoter stuck a $10 bill in my shirt pocket and said "Let me buy a couple of hours of your time at home tonight. After dinner, listen to my records and see if you like them." The average local radio guy made less than $100 a week at that time. It took you four hours on the job to earn that $10! So, you listened to records at home that night.

No deejay worth a damn (the only ones being solicited) ever actually played a record for pay. Who would blow off their audience and jeopardize their career for $10? You played what you earnestly believed would build your audience.

The "buy your time at home" arrangement worked until the record promoters started reporting these expenditures as expenses on their tax returns. The IRS stumbled across that fact and began checking to see if the deejays were reporting the income on their personal tax returns. Many were not. The IRS visited them at home with a bill for unpaid taxes.

But for my one-time boss Peter Tripp, then at WMGM Radio in New York, the local law stepped in and charged Pete with breaking some sort of law against commercial bribery. Pete was fined and ultimately lost his job over the non-scandal.

Except for the IRS, which lost a little tax revenue at first, the whole Payola scandal was bogus. But newspapers, always happy to give a little grief to their competitors at the local radio stations, piled on to the story.