In the early 1960's I had a brief career as a small-town radio DJ, which might sound a little glamorous but I have to confess that I fell short of the ideal in several ways. (Of course, when you take into account that I was earning minuscule wages, I guess the level of my talent was pretty much a perfect match.)
Among my shortcomings was the fact that mine wasn't the smoothest voice in broadcasting history, and I sounded like a hick amateur — not surprisingly, since that's what I was. On top of that, my ability to ad-lib on the air - a very important skill - was about two steps below that of an industrial robot. But those were only a couple of my faults. I had others.
For example, I was just plain stubborn about the music I played. Our small station didn't have a program director so the supervision was a little lacking. The owner was pretty much the entire management team, and he was busy going out and trying to sell commercial time, so as long as I stuck to the station's music library I could play just about anything.
The library consisted of a big shelf of LP record albums, a mix of easy listening, pop and country, and the idea was that we'd work our way from left to right, playing one song from each album. The problem was that I grew to have certain favorite songs, and that's the song I'd play from each album every time through.
The songs I liked were often the most popular from each particular artist anyway, so I suppose you could make the case that those tunes were also the favorites of our listeners (all six of them) but since I seldom played any of the other songs on the albums, they didn't get a chance to find out for themselves.
An interesting side effect is that all these years later, whenever I hear one of those songs I'm immediately reminded of those days at the radio station. A good example is a piece that was one of my favorites, a story-song that was a huge hit for the singer and is still his most famous, even though he's had over two dozen top-ten hits.
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