This turned up yesterday
A most amazing document! Mucho thanks to Jim for putting me on to it! For those who don’t know, this is a hour of broadcasting from August 1969 (though how “Express yourself” by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Band got in there, I don’t know – the single must have been a sleeper), complete with adverts (one for Schlitz by Kenny Burrell).
Sonny Hopson is fantastic! A relentless, captivating, dance with words. No wonder he and people like him across the USA could break records out! Records like Charles Earland’s “Black talk”, which hit #7 on the R&B album chart and certainly had Hopson behind it; “The mighty burner” on that LP was named after Hopson, who also wrote the sleeve notes (and, it appears from the notes to this CD, was Earland’s manager – and incidentally George Freeman’s).
Being British, I never had the opportunity to listen to a REAL deejay. When I first visited the US, I was in Newark and listened a lot to WBGO. But the DJs there (and I assume they’re typical) are like the ones on the BBC. Listening to Hopson made me wonder to what extent Bop became less popular than it needed to have been because the DJs were so boring.
MG