The Forum · BBC World Service

Music on the move

June 15, 2024·49 min·2 clips

A radio hidden inside a stuffed toy poodle kept a young girl awake listening to Ella Fitzgerald — and made her an opera singer.

A beach photograph opens the argument. Izzy Lawrence starts with newlyweds in 1923 listening to a radio between them, a small scene that makes portable listening feel older and more social than the usual gadget story. Julie's memory brings it close. A Memorial Day trip to the Jersey Shore in 1968, a battery-operated record player, some LPs, and a tall young musician turn music into a way people meet, not just something playing in the background. Then the street takes over. One guest remembers cricket scores coming through radios in everyday Indian life, with a whole street reacting to runs, fours, and sixes as though the match had moved outside. Politics arrives plainly. During the emergency declared by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s, the BBC World Service mattered to Indians trying to hear news about their country and how that moment looked abroad. Advertising sticks too. Murphy Radio, Echo Radio, and the toddler in the Murphy advert put the transistor across billboards, shops, newspapers, and memory. The host then asks Damon what changed when listening left the home. Damon answers with New York: transistor radios first, then louder boom boxes filling 1960s and 1970s streets with music and talk. His home had music as well, but the jazz from his mother did not sound like the street, and that gap gives the episode its sharpest sense of place. The ending turns softer. A listener says good music is still there, but social media has crowded the field, so discovery can feel like searching instead of just hearing. The credits stay modest, with historians Annie Jameson, Jannevi Falke, and Karin Beisterfeld, musician Damon Krakowski, and listener contributors all part of a story about portable listening as romance, public noise, political lifeline, advertising, and memory.

As heard by us

A warm social history of portable music, from beach romance to cricket streets and New York boom boxes.

Portable music gets treated as social history here, beginning with a century-old beach photograph and a 1968 Jersey Shore romance sparked by a battery-operated record player.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want a history of portable sound that starts with a 1923 beach photograph and keeps rolling into the street.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Forum