Radio’s ‘Christmas Festival’ Memories!

I recently received an E-mail from Frank Murphy … who was one of our key associates at our Bonneville Broadcast Consultants radio syndication entity, where we provided Easy Listening/ “Beautiful Music” programming and related services to nearly 200 FM radio stations in cities across the nation … where he writes about what went into annually preparing our special Christmas Eve and Day holiday special.

Frank writes:

“This time of year always brings thoughts of one of your all time greatest promotions (in my humble opinion anyway), the annual Christmas Festival of Music (affectionately known as the “CFM”). I always have and always will think of this as the masterpiece that it was … those WRFM full page ads listing the music for Christmas Day in The New York Times and KBIG in The Los Angeles Times and similar promotions across the country were legendary, for sure.

As I recall, we (you) started working on the actual programming of new and updated Christmas segments back in August.

But my most vivid recollection was taking all of those “C” tape cards home and shuffling them around to come up with the exact tape sequence that would appear in the newspaper ad. Considering (as you well know) that there are a very limited number of familiar and popular Christmas songs (maybe three dozen?), it was not an easy task when I took all the segment cards home and started shuffling them on the dining room table to come up with the minimum repetition possible (and certain segments that had to open and close the 30-hour sequence), without having those limited number of titles too close together … which would be especially noticed in print. After all, we did have very dedicated listeners who actually followed along, comparing the music on air with the ad. Talk about an Excedrin headache! LOL!

After double and triple checking the sequence to look for ideal title separation (and asking my wife Mary Lee to scan them too), I’d stack the cards in sequence and deliver them to you for final review. You’d carefully review them, make some adjustments and we send it to the typesetter. When the proof came back, I recall that we almost always found a couple of “conflicts” with titles too close together. But to re-shuffle the entire deck would create even more conflicts, so on the final printer’s galley we discretely “deleted” (i.e., crossed out) a few tunes from the newspaper listing hoping no one noticed.

Anyway, it’s just one great Bonneville memory (one of many) that always brings a smile to my face.”

As I wrote in my radio career memoir, RADIO … My Love, My Passion, this holiday feature which became a tradition was another spur-of-the-moment intuitive idea. The year was 1963, WDVR in Philadelphia had just begun broadcasting in May of that year as a brand-new FM station, and President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated just a month earlier:

Not having any commercials to air, I conceived of calling our all-holiday music programming on Christmas Eve and Day our first annual Christmas Festival of Music to set it apart from our regular programming. While there might have been stations elsewhere which played a full diet of holiday-oriented music for the day-and-a-half period, I was not aware of them. Most stations that I knew, if they aired Christmas themed programming, aired mostly hour and half-hour specialty shows. However, by Christmas 1964, numerous stations across the country had picked up on the nonstop-music approach.

For the first couple of years, while we aired a lot of Christmas selections through the month of December, the Festival did not begin until 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve and actually had some regular tunes mixed in by later on Christmas Day. Compare that to 50 years later, when at least one radio station in every market of any size across the country plays non-stop Christmas music for as much as six weeks leading up to Christmas.

As you’ll see from the portion of this Christmas 1969 WDVR music listings ad, not too much had changed formula-wise from the first Festival seven years earlier … the actual Festival did not begin until 9 PM Christmas Eve, although the station had been playing loads of holiday recordings in the days leading up; in fact, during Christmas week, the mix had likely been 50% holiday tunes and carols.

Note that WDVR had not yet begun playing any solo vocal recordings, whereas I’m certain WRFM did in 1969 — by that time I was there and 1969 would have been WRFM’s first annual Festival. As I’ve written about elsewhere, the station’s programming already included solo vocal recordings in its mix and, when adjusting the music to bring it in line with my philosophy, I chose to retain some appropriate solo artists and titles along with the group-vocal selections I’d played in Philadelphia and Boston. Hence, when it came to Christmas, we included solo vocal favorites like Nat’s “Christmas Song” and this one, which is one of the favorites still heard on all-Christmas music stations across the land — even though Andy recorded it in 1963!

As a final note, I’m pretty certain that by the time we had begun providing programming to stations beyond WRFM in the early 1970s, the Festival had been expanded to 30 hours, beginning at 6 PM Christmas Eve. Also, by the later 1970s, we were providing scheduling for 36 hours, as some stations were desiring to begin at Noon on December 24^th, to which I had no opposition.

I retired from the Company at the end of 1987, so not sure how many more years the CFM was provided to client stations. As you see from the WDVR and WRFM newspaper ads from early on, what we called it on the air was not mentioned in the outside promotion. Plus, we had no requirement that client stations use the CFM name when airing this musical package; hence, you could have been listening to our programming on a station in some city without knowing it’s source — nor do I remember if our competitors who provided Easy Listening/ “Beautiful Music” programming services delivered such a Christmas package.

What I do know … when this genre of music arrived at XM Satellite Radio in 2002, that Christmas the Christmas Festival of Music returned to the airwaves. The difference by then was a computer constructed the basic music schedule, yet it definitely required a lot of fine-tuning!

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