| Abstract: | This essay explores the diverse field of audio records manufactured as tie-ins to popular American radio programs of the postwar period. Little has been written on such products as meaningful artifacts of consumption during any phase in broadcasting history. Yet radio records proved especially meaningful to customers in the 1940s and 1950s, as they offered a highly convenient way to upend rigid transmission schedules and program ephemerality. Here, I focus on spoken word radio albums that promised listeners important broadcast knowledge stored for ‘posterity’ on disk. Phonograph companies like Columbia banked on consumer interest in replay of these programs to sell radio records as technologies of permanence and documents with unparalleled historical and cultural value. I analyze program-to-record case studies like You Are There (1949) and The Quick and the Dead (1951) to illustrate how producers lay claim to historical authenticity via capturing, recording, or releasing transient moments on records. |
