What would summer holidays be without tubes? of summer, these songs that turn on a loop at the radio, which we sing at the top of our voices and which make you dance until the end of the night? Over the next few weeks, The duty takes you on a journey musical and temporal to (re)discover these hits that marked our summers.
The radio revolution immediately began its very useful life in music. On the other hand, it took decades before innovating with the charts and more or less summer hits.
The first licenses to operate a commercial radio in Canada were granted by the Department of Marine and Fisheries (sic) in April 1922, which simultaneously distributed about twenty for the cities of Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver and from Montreal. CKAC becomes the first of these new technological marvels to come into service a few months later, on September 27 of the same year, exactly 100 years ago, with a recital by Quebec pianist Émiliano Renaud (1875-1932).
A virtuoso and pedagogue recognized as far away as the United States, Maestro Renaud had returned to settle in Montreal towards the end of the previous year. An advertisement praising his services published in The duty of September 16, 1921 promised a “foolproof and rapid” method of learning to “play the piano on principle in 15 lessons or less”.
For thousands of years and until the turn of the XXe century, music was consumed in this way, either by producing it oneself, or by listening to a musician produce it live, period. Mechanical recording and reproduction turned this world upside down. Thomas Edison designed his first phonograph in 1877, and Berliner zinc discs appeared about twenty years later. The “trench gramophone”, a portable version in a suitcase, spread during the First World War. The 78 rpm standard dates from the early 1920s.
The radio has again revolutionized the change in the reproducibility of sounds by dematerializing it. Émiliano Renaud began a fundamental transformation at CKAC that continues to expand, now with streaming services.
“CKAC will have a tradition of broadcasting what can be called ‘high culture’ (with quotation marks) in its early years, in fact from its earliest hours as Renaud’s choice to inaugurate the station clearly shows”, says Jean Boivin, full professor at the University of Sherbrooke, former researcher and columnist for Radio-Canada, specialist in Western classical music.
An airtime called “considerable” by the teacher is then reserved for “serious remarks”, for example with the program provincial time (1929-1939) causing art, literature and science, or university time (1931-1933) presented in collaboration with the University of Montreal. The chain will also quickly create its own orchestra devoting itself to all genres, including classical.
The nascent mass media is then seen here (and still elsewhere at France Culture or at the BBC) as an educational tool, a means of introduction to culture. Radio and then television are also seen in Canada as means of countering American cultural imperialism, particularly on the French-speaking side.
“Yes, there is a very didactic concern for popular cultural development,” says Professor Denis Saint-Jacques of Laval University, a specialist in the history of literature and culture in Quebec. “We claim to educate the people, but in truth the people don’t really want Beethoven or Bach, while being very happy to finally have access to them without going to the too expensive concert halls. Suddenly, people were able to listen to music, all music, all the time, at home, then in the car. This consumption of music all day long signals a completely new practice. »
An electrical mutation
Mr. Boivin is working on a history of the diffusion of musical modernity in Quebec, which will include a chapter on the importance of radio. He wrote a very enlightening article on cultural development and access to “great music” by radio in Quebec in the 1930s and 1940s in the Broadcasting History Notebooks (2016).
While preparing this article, he understood that the sound quality of the records of the time left something to be desired and that the distribution of these recordings added distortions. “The live music at first sounded better than the records,” he explains. It took tape recorders of the 1940s, and then vinyl, to fix this problem. Radio stations therefore employed orchestras, and since early gramophones were quite expensive, people often listened to live music on the radio. »
There were only three transmitting stations in 1931, and only one out of three households (30%) then had a reception station, with a very low rate (8%) in rural areas that were still poorly electrified. A decade later, 16 stations (including 14 French) were broadcasting on the AM band, and 70% of households had a set.
“Surveys show that we have achieved a very, very high penetration rate,” says Professor Saint-Jacques. Posts are relatively inexpensive, and the economic crisis is not conducive to the sale of show tickets. »
At noon sharp, from 1941, everyone was listening to the broadcast The Merry Troubadours. The programming of the 1930s and 1940s was then organized around variety and comedy shows, local news, weather forecasts and broadcasts of hockey matches. Amateur singing or performance competitions also make it possible to fill large time slots at little cost.
The French-speaking channels broadcast national and French musical productions, those of “the mother country” as they said at the time. The genres rub shoulders, jazz then dominant, ditty, dance music and even a good place for folklore and brass bands. Classical and lyrical art benefited from reserved slots, in fact especially at Radio-Canada, from the mid-1930s.
“Local stations, whose transmission power is limited, broadcast few cultural programs, and radio reception is often poor,” writes Professor Boivin in his article. The tuned frequencies are close together and the receivers inaccurate, which causes interference, especially with American stations. »
This competition is not all bad. The very high quality American orchestras heard there will in fact quite quickly force the enhancement of the quality of Quebec productions. A bit like the massive broadcast of the best American TV series has changed the expectations of viewers all over the world.
Towards the hit parade
American channels are also introducing the habit of music charts. A megapopular show titled Your Hit Parade appeared in 1935. The first list of the most popular sound recordings was published by the magazine Billboard on January 4, 1936. The tops 10, 40 or 50 date from the early 1950s.
Richard Baillargeon, historian of popular Quebec music, who published Good use of prize lists (2019), recounts in an interview that Guy Mauffette proposed as early as 1947 The Parade of the French Chansonnette as part of a daily program by Jacques Normand on CKVL. In the same position, from 1955, the disc jockey Léon Lachance was a hit by simply offering an American hit parade.
Mr. Baillargeon, now in his seventh decade, also confides the importance radio has had in developing his own central interest. He adds that his passion for music goes back to the Mégatones in 1962, a pop group he listened to every Saturday on the show the youth cabaret of CHRC, in Quebec. He quotes Hervé Brousseau (1937-2017) and hums Dream and Conquest.
“When I was young, we didn’t have television at home,” he says. I listened to the radio, and in the evening, since the AM waves travel far, we received American stations like WKBW from Buffalo and WPTR from New York State. The channels mixed musical genres at the time, and even more so in the regions. We were going from one station to another and we might come across something interesting. »
He cites callsigns from La Pocatière, Montmagny and Saint-Georges, where the freedom of DJs seemed unlimited, for example to play both sides of the new 45s and not just the best piece on the market. “I learned as much if not more English like that than at school. We transcribed the lyrics into a notebook, completing the work after several broadcasts, which could take days or weeks…”