I'd like to find out what your favorite Christmas season shows are.

I'm planning on compiling them together for a Spotify playlist to listen to. (If I hear "All I want for Christmas is you" one more time I'm going to lose my mind)

OTRR-maintained Destination Freedom v2411 (6.8 GB on Windows/104 episodes) is available for download from Dropbox, OneDrive or pCloud. Thanks to all those who made this collection possible.

These links will be available for 30 days. The episodes of this set will be released on our YouTube channel at https://otrr.cc/yt starting December 1.

• pCloud: https://otrr.cc/Iy3gzx
• Dropbox: https://otrr.cc/xVgK5q
• OneDrive: https://otrr.cc/nWk9bJ

Synopsis

Destination Freedom is perhaps the best-known Black old-time radio series, despite only airing on Chicago’s WMAQ and never being fully sponsored throughout its duration. This is in part due to transcription disks for three-quarters of the episodes being discovered in the early 1980s and circulated among old-time radio fans, which helped inspire additional interest and research into the show. However, the powerful – and radical, particularly for the times – storytelling of Richard Durham, combined with the quality ensemble performing these episodes make them well worth revisiting.

The series debuted June 27, 1948 on WMAQ, in the public-service time slot of Sunday at 10 am. The first several episodes were partially sponsored by the Chicago Defender newspaper until cast member Oscar Brown Jr. ran for office in opposition to one of the paper’s endorsed candidates. Additionally, a handful of episodes in early 1950 were partially sponsored by the Chicago Urban League, but for the most part WMAQ footed the bill for the series.

In many ways, the show built upon Durham’s earlier work on Democracy – USA, including revisiting several of the individuals and subjects covered in that earlier series. Whereas that show was only 15 minutes and WJJB and CBS exerted a fair amount of control over the scripts and subjects, Durham had a full 30 minutes to tell his stories, and more editorial control over the new series.

That is not to say there were not conflicts between Durham and WMAQ and NBC, and WMAQ retained final editorial control and approval of all scripts. While Durham managed to produce episodes about the attempted slave revolt of Denmark Vesey and the assassination of Mississippi State Senator Charles Caldwell, episodes about Nat Turner and Paul Robeson were deemed too controversial and were rejected.

Richard Durham was responsible for all 97 original episodes, with the help of Vivian Harsh and her staff at Hall Branch Library. Durham covered a wide range of historical and contemporary subjects and people, from Crispus Attucks and Harriet Tubman to Jackie Robinson and Gwendolyn Brooks. Additional episodes were produced that covered Black folklore figures like John Henry and Stackalee, and common men and women like the all-Black 332nd Fighter Group in World War II.

The episodes portrayed Black characters in a positive and realistic light – in stark contrast to how Black people were generally presented in American media at the time. Durham also highlighted the accomplishments of several Black women, presenting them as every much the equal to the men around them. This too, was a rare portrayal of women – of any race – in radio at the time. 

Despite the popularity of the series, particularly with Black Americans, the series broadcast its final episode August 13, 1950. WMAQ had been spending between $15,000 and $18,000 a year on the series, and there were increasingly vocal critics of it, including the American Legion and the Knights of Columbus. In 1950, a new director, John Keown, was brought in to manage the show. That was the final straw for Durham, who declared Keown’s “massacre of [my] scripts was butchery I could no longer endure,” and pulled the plug on his show.
A couple of months later, WMAQ announced they were bringing back the show with a different format that would highlight the accomplishments of primarily white patriots. Durham, who held the copyright to the series name, immediately sued. Ultimately, this version lasted less than a year and produced fewer than half the episodes the prolific Durham had penned.

Destination Freedom was notable for its hard-hitting examination of racism and injustice in the United States, particularly at a time when McCarthyism was on the rise. As historian J. Fred MacDonald noted, “Nowhere else in radio history did a single series, written by a single talent over as long a period, project such a strident reminder of liberties denied and rights abused.” 

Updates:
v2202: Initial version

v2411:

• two new episodes, "The Secretary of Peace" and "The Sorrow Songs"
• several sound upgrades, mainly in the 1948 series

Audio Noir is my go-to for online OTR programming. Many of the detectives in the various shows tend to get thumped on the head every few episodes and end up unconscious. I think that I may have heard a couple Johnny Dollar episodes back to back in which he got knocked out for an extended amount of time.

I know that it was a trope early on, but damn, a concussion every couple weeks that causes unconsciousness would very likely lead to terminal neurological decline.

Hey friends. Just like the title says, I need some help.

My father passed away June 14th, 2024. He left me a treasure in our finished basement. 2 reel to reel recorders, and a collection of reel to reels, all of them have his voice on them.

I was told my entire life that, "I use to like to play radio announcer and so those reels, that's what's on those." Some of them are still blanks too but most are of my dad playing his favorites.

I found out at the funeral that that wasn't the whole truth. One of his cousins said he was a pirate radio host. Said he had built a tower and was broadcasting all of that.

He left me this mystery to solve. I just want to digitize it for sentimental reasons. But I'm afraid to even touch the stuff because my dumb butt didn't pay attention and it's so old I'm afraid I'll break it.

Can one of y'all help me retrieve my father's voice?

I hope you are all having a wonderful day. I just didn't know where else to turn, for help with reel to reel recorders. Thank you all for taking the time to read this. All the love.

OTRR-maintained Amos and Andy v2411 (24.3 GB on Windows/435 episodes) is available for download from Dropbox, OneDrive or pCloud. Thanks to all those who made this collection possible.

These links will be available for 30 days. The episodes of this set were released on our YouTube channel at https://otrr.cc/yt starting November 16.

*** Important! This is a very large set. Please transfer the zip files - individually - to your own cloud storage account whenever possible, rather than downloading, to prevent the cloud providers from blocking them. ***

• pCloud: https://otrr.cc/hJ44ON
• Dropbox: https://otrr.cc/FUcZ0w
• OneDrive: https://otrr.cc/TSyJ01

Synopsis

There are few radio shows from the Golden Age of Radio that evoke more of a response than Amos and Andy. The series is at once one of the most beloved series from that time and one of the most controversial. Entire books have been written just about this one show. Regardless of one’s personal feelings about the program, the characters’ on-air presence lasted from 1926 to 1960, overlapping the entirety of the generally accepted era of old-time radio.

The series’ roots stretch all the way back to January 12, 1926, when the precursors of Amos Jones and Andy Brown, Sam Smith and Henry Johnson, arrived on the airwaves in Sam ‘n’ Henry. The two Black characters, created by Freeman Gosden (who played Sam) and Charles Correll (who played Henry), first appeared on WGN when the station owners asked them to come up with a daily radio serial that would mirror those found in parent newspaper The Chicago Tribune.

After 586 broadcasts, Gosden and Correll left WGN on December 18, 1927, when the station refused to allow them to record their program to distribute to more stations. Three months later the pair resurfaced on another Chicago rival station, WMAQ, with a $25,000 contract in hand. Changing their names to Amos Jones (played by Gosden) and Andrew Brown (played by Correll), Amos ‘n’ Andy premiered on March 19, 1928.

Other than the names of the main characters and changing the setting to Harlem from Chicago, the series was little changed from their previous effort. Unlike WGN, WMAQ allowed Gosden and Correll to distribute their recorded programs and via this early syndication method they were heard coast to coast within a year and had attracted a sponsor, Pepsodent, who would underwrite the show for years.

For the first fifteen years of its existence, Amos ‘n’ Andy was a melodramatic serial airing each weekday written entirely by Gosden and Correll, who also performed the voices for all the characters who appeared in the storylines, with a few supporting players only coming in later in the run. The program aired daily for fifteen minutes, reaching a peak of popularity in 1931 when an estimated 75% of the radio audience tuned in, accounting for one-third to one-fourth of the country’s entire population. Amos ‘n’ Andy weathered some mild criticism from the Black press in the early 1930s and even after its fame inevitably cooled after 1931, the show maintained a healthy audience of fourteen million to the late 1930s and still reached twelve million listeners when the daily serial finally wrapped up on February 19, 1943 after more than 4,000 broadcasts.

After eight months off the air, Amos Jones and Andy Brown returned on October 8, 1943, in a new show called The Amos and Andy Show. While Amos and Andy were the same characters they had been for the last fifteen years, the format of the series was turned upside down. Its time was doubled to a full half hour, writing duties were handed over to professional scripters, an orchestra headed by Raymond Scott brought a big, new musical sound, and a full cast of actors took over the supporting roles previously played primarily by Gosden and Correll. Amos and Andy now sounded like all the big sitcom programs on the airwaves and NBC was surely pleased as the audience popped and within a few seasons had tripled over what the show was reaching before the reboot.

While the addition of an expanded supporting cast was a huge change for the series, that many of these secondary characters were voiced by Black performers was an even bigger change. For whatever discomfort having two white actors voicing the lead Black characters brought to the radio industry by the 1940s, the opportunities that were opened to Black actors on the show are unquestionable. Among those with ongoing roles were Ruby Dandridge, Eddie Green, Jester Hairston, Johnny Lee, Hattie McDaniel, Amanda Randolph, Lillian Randolph, Ernestine Wade, and Ernest Whitman. Sporadic roles also were picked up Black actors, including Dorothy Dandridge, Vivian Dandridge, Roy Glenn, and Wonderful Smith.

The Rexall Drug Company picked up sponsorship of the show after six years, when Rinso dropped it, and The Amos and Andy Show cruised along for a full dozen years, finally leaving the air on May 22, 1955. Yet Amos and Andy still weren’t done with radio. On September 13, 1954, nine months before the weekly sitcom left the air, Amos Jones and Andy Brown debuted on a new series called Amos ‘n’ Andy Music Hall.

Unlike their previous 28 years of radio work, Correll and Gosden’s latest effort was basically a glorified disc jockey program, featuring the known voices of Amos and Andy. There was no real storyline, nor did it connect in any way to the concurrently running weekly sitcom. The duo spun tunes and engaged in light patter in between the music. It was described as “embarrassing” by no less than old-time radio stalwart John Dunning, but “profitable” by historian Jim Cox.

But not even Amos and Andy, who were there at the beginning of the Golden Age of Radio, could last forever, and they finally turned out the lights on November 26, 1960, the same day that saw The Couple Next Door, The Right to Happiness, and Ma Perkins come to an end. William Paley, the head of CBS who poached Gosden and Correll from NBC, recognized the significance of Amos and Andy’s absence from the airwaves. “It was sad to see . . . [the] oldtimers go,” he conceded.

Gosden and Correll had one last gasp in them, Calvin and the Colonel, an animated television series about a fox and a bear who bore a striking resemblance to Andy Brown and the Kingfish, who had essentially replaced Amos Jones in the radio program over the years. The series lasted for only the 1961-1962 season but lasted for years thereafter in reruns. Correll and Gosden finally retired after this, dying in 1972 and 1982 respectively.

Amos and Andy proved to be an absolute sensation during its heyday, appearing in almost every media imaginable, from motion pictures to comic books to toys and even to television. The latter aired on CBS from 1951-1953 and featured an all-Black cast, something unheard of at the time. Nevertheless, the television series was cancelled after two seasons and the network has never given permission for it to be aired in reruns or sold in home video format.

https://youtu.be/zz_PGwWDQow?si=iVz6mutt_XT0a8uk

In 2018 I decided to quit my theatre department and make a podcast. I was 18 years old, had only ever used microphones in a musical, and knew nothing about distribution. But my teacher gave me a bunch of cassettes of old radio dramas, and I thought that perhaps I could do something like that, too.

I would write, direct, score, act, and publish a new audio drama every single month for 17 months. And then I burnt out. My mental health plummeted. I started to hate myself for not being able to write more, for not producing more content. I never finished season 2.

When I finally found the energy to work on the audio drama again, I skipped the rest of season 2 and decided to start with season 3. I only made it 3 episodes in before COVID hit and my depression returned.

It looked like it was going to be the end of my creative foray into audio drama. It was a good enough run, I suppose. Perhaps a little edgy at times.

But then I started going to therapy. I started surrounding myself with new friends. And I realized what I was missing was a theme - a reason to listen. Sure, these were fun episodes, but what tied them together?

So, I got into worldbuilding. I made "Madison, Maine" and the people within it. I wrote it's history from it's very first settlers in 1796 to the population boom of the 40s and the tourism industry boom of the late 2010s. I made this fake place feel so real. And I decided to change my angle. Mental health was so important to me and so many of my friends and family were struggling with their own battles. I started writing stories about people fighting manifestations of mental health demons, of losing and winning battles against imposter syndrome, depression, anxiety. And the stories started meaning something to me again.

I produced season 4. Season 5. Season 6. And have been working on Season 7.

But in the meantime I've also decided to do side projects, like "Evil, It Crawled". This is my first ever LIVE performance of my podcast, and tickets will be available so that people can attend in person OR online. Complete with live voice acting, music, and Foley! It's an Eldritch drama that follows political novice Maxwell Harkless as he and his on again off again friend, Brynn, come across an ancient evil in the forests of Maine.

The show is on November 15th at 7 pm EST. Tickets can be purchased here: https://checkout.xola.app/index.html#seller/643062ac52947d33081a84e9/experiences/66b22ae983ade6b14d01a204?openExternal=true

(All ticket proceeds go towards performing future shows and paying local Columbus artists)

Additionally, one can listen to other audio drama podcast episodes here: https://retrospectionmultimedia.com/retrospection-radio-theatre/

Stumbled across OTR recently and last night I dipped my toe into a few episodes. I did the first Gunsmoke, The Zero Hour, and a Yours Truly Johnny Dollar.

As someone who's never really listened to much radio or podcasts, I'm in love with with the vibe already!

What are some of your favourites? I like mystery and twists especially so some shows that lean into that would be great.

Hello! My boys and I adore the serialized adventure radio show format of the 30s and 40s — I Love A Mystery and the two serialized Tarzan stories are their favorites so far (though ILAM is often a little too scary for their age, so I have only let them listen to a couple of the milder stories). Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher so far has been an absolute home run.

Are there any other serialized adventure shows we should try? Something with cliffhangers rather than self contained episodes is ideal.

They also like Escape, but that is not serialized and often too horror-slanted/adult for them, so that is rare and carefully screened.

Thank you!