WSB Radio History

The publisher of the Atlanta Journal in 1921, Cohen was visited by a former Navy sailor who while in the military worked as a “wireless operator".  Walter Tison convinced Cohen that it would be a great idea for the Journal to begin building a commercial radio station.  Cohen was sold on the idea and placed an order for equipment.  He was anxious to beat rival newspaper The Atlanta Constitution to be the first paper with a radio station.  On March 15, 1922, Cohen’s dream became reality. 

"Fiddlin" John Carson as he was known brought what was then called “hillbilly” music to the airwaves of WSB.  Carson is thought to have been the first country musician on WSB. The unconfirmed date of his first performance was on his birthday, March 23, 1922. His 1923 recording of “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” was the first commercially successful country music record.  Click on file below to listen to the song.

More about the life and times of "Fiddlin" John Carson - The music of "Fiddlin" John Carson from Fannin County, Georgia, was the first of what we know today as "country music" to be broadcast by radio and recorded for phonograph.  He and his daughter, Rosa Lee, who was known as "Moonshine Kate," were the first stars despite the fact that little of the fame and none of the fortunes produced in the country music industry ever were theirs.   Carson was fifty-four years old, had won the Georgia Fiddlin' Championship seven times, and had a colorful reputation as a traveling performer who made a living playing and "passing the hat" when he was not working in the cotton mill, painting houses, or making moonshine when he walked into the "studios" of the brand new radio station WSB started by the Atlanta Journal.  When he announced that he would "like to have a try at the newfangled contraption," Lambdin Kay obliged him.  His only pay being a snort of the engineer's whiskey, Carson performed "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane."  The Journal reported that Carson's fame spread "to every corner of the United States were WSB was heard."  His popularity inspired Polk Brockman, an Atlanta furniture dealer who had been successful in developing and merchandising "race" records for the black market for OKeh records, to persuade OKeh president Ralph Peer to bring his recording equipment to Atlanta to record Fiddlin' John.  On June 14, 1923, in a vacant building on Nassau Street in Atlanta, Georgia, Carson cut two sides, "Little Old Log Cabin" and "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's going to Crow."  Peer announced them "pluperful awful" but agreed to press five hundred on a blank label for Brockman's personal use.  With Fiddlin' John hawking them from the stage of the next Fiddler's convention, Brockman promptly sold every disc. Peer immediately rushed into a major pressing on the OKeh label and invited Carson to New York to record twelve more sides.  (Information courtesy of georgiaencylopedia.org)

Fiddlin' John's daughter, Rosa Lee Carson toured and recorded with her father, and was known as “Moonshine Kate” after one of their songs.  She sang with her father on many occasions on WSB Radio.

More on the life and times of Moonshine Kate from the New Georgia Encylopedia: Rosa Lee Carson, better known as Moonshine Kate, was one of the first women to record country music during the 1920s and one of the genre's earliest female comedians. Her father, Fiddlin' John Carson, made the first successful country record in 1923 and went on to become one of the most extensively recorded country stars of the 1920s. Rosa Lee Carson sang and played guitar and banjo with her father and his band, the Virginia Reelers, first on radio broadcasts and then on more than 170 recordings for the OKeh and Bluebird labels between 1923 and 1934.
Rosa Lee Carson, born in Atlanta on October 10, 1909, was the youngest of nine children of Jenny Nora Scroggins and John Carson. She began singing and buck-and-wing dancing at stage shows and political rallies as part of her father's musical act when she was five years old. By the age of fourteen she was already proficient on the guitar and the banjo. During the early 1920s she began performing with her father on Atlanta's flagship radio station, WSB, and touring with him and the Virginia Reelers at stage shows throughout Georgia and the Southeast. After graduating from high school, Carson became a permanent member of her father's band.
Carson made her recording debut in June 1925 at the age of fifteen, when she accompanied her father on guitar on four songs for OKeh Records. At the session she also recorded two solo sides, "The Lone Child," a Tin Pan Alley song about a ragged, wandering orphan boy, and "Little Mary Phagan," a sentimental ballad, composed by her father, about the 1913 murder of an Atlanta factory girl.
For the next nine years Carson accompanied her father and the Virginia Reelers on tour and on recording sessions in Atlanta, New York, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Camden, New Jersey. In addition to the recordings she made with her father, she also recorded a handful of solos and duets on which she sang lead, including "The Drinker's Child," "Texas Blues," "The Last Old Dollar Is Gone," and "The Poor Girl Story." In 1928 Polk Brockman, OKeh's Atlanta records distributor and talent scout, gave Carson the nickname Moonshine Kate to enhance her hillbilly image, and she embraced it proudly for the rest of her life.
Between 1928 and 1930 Carson performed with her father on eighteen skit recordings for OKeh Records, including "Moonshine Kate," "John Makes Good Licker," and "Corn Licker and Barbecue, Parts 1 & 2." These skits, combining comedic dialogues with brief musical interludes, revolved around the manufacture and consumption of moonshine whiskey in the north Georgia mountains. On them, she played Moonshine Kate, the spirited, sharp-tongued hillbilly daughter of her father's moonshiner character.
After the collapse of record sales during the Great Depression ended their recording contract, Carson and her father worked as campaign entertainers for Eugene Talmadge's 1932 Georgia gubernatorial campaign and in several of his subsequent campaigns for governor and U.S. senator. When she wasn't performing, Carson worked for the Atlanta Department of Recreation during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1944 she married Wayne Johnson, an Atlanta machinist. She lived briefly in Portland, Maine, where her husband was stationed in the navy during World War II, but after his discharge they returned to the Atlanta area.
After retiring, Carson and her husband ran a fishing lodge on Lake Seminole, near Donalsonville. In later years she gave dozens of interviews about early-twentieth-century Atlanta and its old-time music scene, including a series of oral histories with Gene Wiggins for his 1987 biography of her father, Fiddlin' Georgia Crazy. In 1983 Carson and her father were among the first group of old-time musicians inducted into the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame. She died in 1992 in Bainbridge at the age of eighty-three.

Harry Dougherty was one of the first engineers at WSB.  His early duties included setting up a radio receiver in towns all over what is now called "metro" Atlanta to show them that voices were traveling in the air and could be listened to.  People were skeptical of the new invention and Dougherty talked about overcoming the skeptics in an interview for WSB in a 1952 anniversary broadcast (below).

The Reverend Andrew Jenkins of Atlanta was a leading composer of songs popular among southern gospel singers. He has been credited with more than 800 compositions, of which more than two-thirds are sacred songs.  Jenkins and his family were among the first gospel music groups to be heard on any radio station. For ten years (1922 to 1932) they were a regular feature on WSB. Their repertoire included not only gospel music but also folk, popular, and light classical fare.

More on Jenkins from the New Georgia Encyclopedia: The Reverend Andrew Jenkins of Atlanta was a leading composer of songs popular among southern gospel singers. He has been credited with more than 800 compositions, of which more than two-thirds are sacred songs. Jenkins's best-known gospel song is "God Put a Rainbow in the Cloud" (1931), which has been recorded by numerous singers, including Mahalia Jackson.
Jenkins was born on November 26, 1885, in Jenkinsburg, about thirty miles south of Atlanta. In his infancy a medical error left him with only partial vision. Too blind to function in public schools but not sufficiently impaired to qualify for the state's school for the blind, Jenkins had to rely on his own resources to obtain an education. Later in life, another accident rendered him totally blind.
Jenkins discovered at an early age that he could play by ear almost any musical instrument he could get his hands on. "I never took a lesson," he once said. "It's a God gift."
Licensed to preach at the age of twenty, Jenkins moved to Atlanta, where he supplemented his income as a preacher by selling newspapers on the street. In 1919, after his first wife died, Jenkins married Jane Walden Eskew, a young widow and ordained minister who had three musically talented children—two daughters, Irene and Mary Lee, and a son, T. P. With this marriage a family gospel music act was born.
Five months after Atlanta's radio station WSB first began broadcasting in 1922, the Jenkins family presented their first program over the air. They were among the first gospel music groups to be heard on any radio station. For the next ten years they were a regular feature on WSB. Their repertoire included not only gospel music but also folk, popular, and light classical fare. Radio exposure created a demand for Jenkins's sermons and the family's music. They performed concerts and conducted revivals around the state, and Jenkins served as pastor of several churches. In 1924 the family began a recording career that lasted into the 1930s and introduced their music to thousands of households across the country.
Although Jenkins is best known as a composer of gospel music, his secular songs have also enjoyed considerable popularity through the years and have been frequently recorded by country music artists. His specialty was event songs, or news ballads. Folk music scholars have studied these extensively, because many of them have entered folk tradition. His best-known event songs include "The Death of Floyd Collins" (an account of a cave exploration tragedy), "The Wreck of the Royal Palm" (inspired by a two-train collision at Rockmart, Georgia), "The Fate of Frank Dupre" (the story of an Atlanta robbery/murder), and "Ben Dewberry's Final Run" (based on the death of Atlanta resident Ben Dewberry in a 1908 train wreck).

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