What did Oldies radio look like in the 50s/60s/70s?

We generally discuss oldies radio in terms of what it was from the 80s-today. What was Oldies radio back in the 50s-70s and what their playlists look like in each decade? Do you remember listening to oldies radio back then?

 

Didn't exist before the 80s.

 

It existed on some Top 40 stations. When I first started binge listening to the radio at age 9 in 1970, every weekday morning for an hour the local AM station (WMYR 1410) had a show called the "Vault of Treasured Music", and they would do a different year every day. Then on Saturday and Sunday, they had "Super Golden Weekend", where they would still play current stuff, but a lot of older things would be mixed in.

 

Seems like I remember a good number of "easy listening" stations back when I was a kid in the 70s which might the closest equivalent in my mind. They played things like theme from "A Summer Place", Mel Torme, mellow big-band arrangements, etc, all pre-rock music.

 

In the early 70s, WPIX in New York was all oldies, primarily 1950s and pre-psych 1960s.

 

In my part of Louisiana in the early 70s the radio stations had oldies shows that covered 50s New Orleans r&b and the swamp pop genre. A popular station had a Saturday night jazz show where I first heard Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France.

 

When I hear "Tomorrow Never Knows" in 2016, it's like somebody in 1966 listening to music from 1910!!! (Right? I'm terrible at math.)

So the early oldies stations couldn't go as far back as we do, but I remember by the mid-60s, there were stations who really hyped the mainstream pop of pre-Beatles 60s/non-rocking Elvis 50s. Call it The Patti Page-Pat Boone Experience.

I just looked it up at Wikipedia, and they peg the beginning of what we call oldies radio to 1971, with KOOL FM in Phoenix. I remember it just before that, at least as a trend. I also remember the early days of it sprinkling in some new stuff. For example, the Andy Williams take on "Love Story" was a big hit on mainstream AM in 1971 that was just as likely to feature Bill Withers, James Taylor, Carpenters, Three Dog Night et al -- but I also remember hearing it on stations that primarily featured early 60s Brill Building stuff, (proto-power) ballads like Orbison's "Crying" + Elvis' "Love Me Tender", some swinging Sinatra, etc.

Wikipedia also notes that American Graffiti kicked all this into high orbit by 1972-73, which makes 100% sense to me. Happy Days was on the air on Graffiti's heels. Sprinkle that early rock and roll right back into Brill Building and pop balladry in the playlist, and we've got ourselves a razor-sharp genre with a hungry audience with money to spend.

(Trivia for TV nerds. ABC's Love American Style was an anthology-style TV series, known in the trade as "the place that unsold pilots go to die." In the back half of the 1971-72 season, one of those failed pilots was the Garry Marshall-produced "Love and The Television Set," starring Ron Howard, renamed "Love and The Happy Days" for syndication. George Lucas loved it, tapped Ron Howard for Graffiti, which led to Marshall's pilot being picked up after all...and from which he spun off Laverne and Shirley, starring Cindy Williams from Graffiti, and his sister Penny.

Fridays on ABC was a killer night of TV, btw, with plenty for the whole family. Partridge Family, Brady Bunch, Room 222, The Odd Couple, and Love American Style. They don't make 'em like this anymore...)

 

I remember a couple of those, but I remember a lot of Top40 stations doing "Solid Gold Weekends," "One For One" weekends, or weekend request Oldie Shows.
Dick Bartley's "Solid Gold Saturday Night" showed up in the 80s, playing Buddy Holly next to Cream, and under the radar 60s tunes. I heard his current show a couple of months ago, and it's heavy of the 70s. No Beatles.

 

I'm guessing pre-rock, mostly jazz, easy listening playlists.

Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerals, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Doris Day, Duke Ellington etc.

Some blues/folk idk

 

WCBS-FM as well...they turned "oldies" around 1973 playing lots of 50's and 60's while still incorporating the toppermost hits of the current day ("number one THEN...and number one NOW...)...they pretty much stayed like this throughout the 80's then around the early 1990' s they began playing some 80's. These days, the 50's are all but totally phased out and the 60's playlist has become very limited.

 

yep, you beat me to it. I heard many many 50's songs on cbs that I hardly ever heard again when I listened in the 70's. It gave me a great education on the 50's and early sixties music. WFIL in Philly was #2, they combined a top 40 program with 5 or 6 oldies an hour. I remember listening to CBS in my old man's car (he had the best radio) and hearing do wop stuff that really fired my imagination. It was one of the reasons I bought the American Graffiti OST before the movie even came out.

 

KRTH in L.A. was playing oldies back in the 70's. Where one could hear "16 Candles" or "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", I loved it. Now they play 80's music.

 

WCBS-FM started in 1972, doing 1955 to 1964 as "oldies": WCBS-FM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia »

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You both beat me to it.

 

Guess I was never exposed to it. All I remember as far back as 1958, was Easy Listening, Rock, and Country.

 

In the 1970s, LA oldies station KRTH (K-Earth 101) played rock and roll, R&B, Doo-Wop and Motown. The time around British Invasion seemed like the dividing point. There was a lot of 1950s and early '60s nostalgia going on, with American Graffitti in the theaters and Happy Days on TV. The group Sha Na Na wore jeans and black leather jackets and pompadours when they played my high school. I think KRTH was just on AM at that time, later it switched to FM. The main FM rock stations in LA at that time, KLOS and KMET, played rock starting from the British Invasion and after that, basically what is now called Classic Rock except then it was just what was on the radio.

 

I was just about to write essentially the same thing. For me this was a phenomenon in the late 1970's. I was really glad for it otherwise I would have never been exposed to Buddy Holly, The Chiffons and the like.

 

KARA ("In Santa Clara!") was the first and best in the SF bay area, starting around 1974.
They had a large playlist, playing many regional hits and songs that barely scraped the top 40.
Pros were the large 50's - 60's playlist and the FM stereo signal ("Your ONLY stereo oldies station!"),
but the cons were that they occasionally played stereo re-recordings if true stereo was not available.

 

I lived in South Florida in the early '70s and don't know the station call letters (maybe someone else does?)...but it played from the early '50s up to 1965, almost to the minute. None of that hippie music. It was a fabulous education in that era, everything from Bill Haley to the Beatles. To me, that will always be "oldies radio," although the local oldies station is now playing Nirvana....

 

In Chicago WLS and WCFL were top 40, but would play a two to six year old oldie periodically. That was in the mid 60's. We had some stations like WMAQ and WBBM that would play pop music (think Perry Como) during that time. As time progressed into the early 70s WLS and WCFL did not change radically, but WMAQ and WBBM changed formats and WIND took over the mantle playing 50's and 60's pop with some of the current hits. WIND was not quite rock, but played Beach Boys, Beatles and Elvis along with Perry Como and Tony Bennett (all oldies). Around 1973 or so WFYR in Chicago started to play oldies, mostly 50s and early 60's. By 1976 they were about half 50s-half 60s. Dick Bartley had a syndicated oldies program on WFYR through the 70s into the 80s. By 2000 there were so many stations changing formats you couldn't ask me who was playing what format. Here in DC WBIG was playing 60s oldies, but the last couple times I had them on they seemed to cut off around 1980.

All I would listen to much of the time was oldies radio. I listened to WLS for current hits and the radio personalities. The one thing that was different in those days was that the stations would play minor hits or take tracks off of an album. In the 70's even the hard rock stations would go back a couple of years and play late 60's era music - and that was before "Classic Rock" was a category. So I had enough variety on the dial to become familiar with a large variety of artists. Oh, yes...most of the former oldies stations are now either talk stations or or playing songs in Spanish...although WIND stopped playing English language music 30 years ago, played Spanish language music for about 20, and now is a talk station. Everything changes.

 

In memphis TN, where I grew up, in the early 70s there was WHBQ that had what they called "Million Dollar Weekend" mainly playing 50's/early 60s. I was 10 in '74 and remember it well.

 

Yes, all Bill Drake-owned stations (such as WHBQ, WRKO, KHJ, KFRC, KYNO, and KGB did "Million Dollar Weekends" throughout
the 60's and 70's.

 

The oldies station where I grew up in the '70s played a lot of '60s Motown, Stax, and the like.

 

I remember "Oldies" Radio as a child in the late 1980s. I remember hearing these songs being played on Z-95.5 a BUNCH: "Theme From A Summer Place"-Percy Faith, "Renaissance Fair"-The Byrds, "Love Me Do"-Beatles, "Sooner or Later"-Grass Roots, "Sugar Pie Honey Bunch"-Four Tops, "Misty"-Johnny Mathis, "The Rain The Park and Other Things"-The Cowsills, "Sunday Will Never Be the Same"-Spanky and Our Gang, "Strangers in the Night"-Frank Sinatra, and "Under the Boardwalk"-Drifters..

 

There were oldies stations in the 1970s that still played Glenn Miller Orchestra and Sinatra all day.

 

I first heard oldies radio in 1971 or so -- Wolfman Jack on XPRS from Baja. It was all rnb/doo-wop and rockabilly from the early fifties to the very early sixties. A real rock 'n roll lesson for sure, with lots of unexpected deep cuts -- surprising for AM radio.

Next was an FM station from Sacramento whose call letters I don't remember, but ca. '73 ~ '74 it was playing all kinds of great mid-to-late sixties tracks, Nuggets-type material along with poprock and LOTS of British Invasion. So cool. But, so frustrating, too, as somehow that station was able to get all kinds of stereo mixes I absolutely could not find at the time. Reception was sometimes poor where I was (90 or 100 miles away) but I could always home in on it when I heard Pictures of Matchstick Men. Someone there loved that tune. That station was also the first place I heard true stereo Hollies mid-sixties tracks. Another interesting thing was that I guess it wasn't strictly old stuff. I heard my first Bowie tune on that station (Changes) which was then current. Living In The Past and Sweet Dream by Jethro Tull seemed to be in regular rotation, too. Man I miss those days for radio.