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Listening to Radio: 1920-1950 RAY BARFIELD, 1996 Greenwood, CT, Praeger pp. xiv+218, ilus.; $45.00 (cloth)
Ray Barfield, a professor of English at Clemson University, had a great idea. In Listening to Radio: 192F1950, Barfield reports on the memories of radio listeners. The book is best when it presents a history of radio listening in the words of the listeners; it's not as good when it slips into a history of the radio programs. The accounts of when and why the radio audience listened, what their parents thought, who listened with them, and what sets they used, all of which the reader encounters in the book's first section (`How They Listened to the Radio') remind us of what oral history does well. Barfield and his informants are aware of the limitations of memory as historical evidence but sometimes they can't help trying to remember when particular shows appeared, who starred in them, and what it all meant, especially in the book's second section `What They Heard' and those endeavors prove less helpful and less interesting.
Listening to Radio combines two approaches of current interest to scholars-audience response, particularly to popular culture, and people's use of historical memory. Although he...