The Crystal Set or How I Found the Blues

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PICTURED ABOVE: Little Vootie and the Natives, McNicholas High School, Circa 1959, Jerry Kanis (second from left). Editor's Note: Band Member Bobby Armstrong (third from right) went on to have #6 hit on the Top 40 Chart with the Casinos.

This story begins in the early 1950’s when I was a student at St. Mathews Grade School in Norwood, Ohio. I had been assigned a project for the school's upcoming science fair. After seeing an advertisement for a crystal radio kit in Mechanic’s Illustrated Magazine, my dad suggested that it might be a good project for me to try. 

Crystal radios would only receive AM radio broadcasts. Remember this is before FM radio, way before satellite radio and actually way, way before satellites themselves even existed. 

It all sounded very interesting to me. So, we sent twenty-five cents to the address in the ad and waited for my crystal radio kit to arrive via U.S. Mail.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity to a grade school kid, my crystal radio kit was delivered. I didn't waste a moment opening it.  The kit included an ultra-sensitive piece of crystal, a 'cat's whisker' tuning device, two terminals for wire connections and a headset. It was really very easy to assemble and just as easy to operate. When dad and I got it all put together we tried it out. At the time, I had no idea the life-long impact the effects of my new crystal radio would have on me. 

My crystal radio amazed everybody; my classmates, my friends, the teachers and even my parent's friends. I can't remember what grade I got on the project. But long after the science fair was over, I can remember laying in my bed late at night listening to my crystal set underneath the covers. I could pick up clear channel stations from all over the country; like WSB in Atlanta, WLS from Chicago and of course WLW right there in Cincinnati. I also discovered WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee. This is where I first heard The Blues. 

On WJW up in Cleveland, a young disc jockey named Alan Freed had a nightly broadcast called The Moondog Show. He was playing a frenzy of a new kind of music. It was a combination of R&B, Pop, Jazz, Country and God knows what else. You couldn't hear this kind of stuff on Cincinnati radio, not yet anyway. Freed began referring to this new kind of music he was playing as “rock 'n' roll”. According to rock historians, he is indeed credited as the first to coin the phrase. 

Sponsors of all these types of radio shows included Rendezvous Records in Cleveland, Ohio, Randy's Record Shop in Gallatin, Tennessee and Nashville's Ernie's Record Mart and Buckley's Record Shop. All of which operated mail order businesses selling the recordings featured on these nightly shows. 

At the time, I thought I was the only kid listening to this new kind of music. But over the years, I can’t tell you how many of my friends, business associates and acquaintances have told me that they were doing the very same thing at that time too. 

These broadcasts proved to be an early influence on many future rock musicians. Robbie Robertson of The Band once said in an interview that when he was as a kid in Toronto, he would stay up all night listening to the blues from all the way down in Tennessee played by disc jockey John R from on WLAC. Other well known rock musicians, the likes of Johnny Winter, Duane and Greg Allman of the Allman Brothers have all credited these stations and the music that they were playing as being a major influence on them as well. 

This all certainly influenced me too. I even bought a hollow body guitar and learned to play a few riffs. I eventually joined a rock band in high school called Little Vootie and the Natives. We had moderate success on Cincinnati's Far East Side Catholic High School Gymnasium Circuit. 

What I was listening to had an influence on my younger brothers as well. At a very young age they were hearing the likes of Chuck Berry, Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley all emanating from the hi-fi in my room. 

Little did any of us know at that time that what we were all hearing, seeing and playing was the beginning of a phenomenon that is bigger than ever today... “rock 'n' roll”!

- Jerry Kanis