Radio doings (Dec 1930-Jun1932)

LONELY TROUBADOR He Sings the Soul of a Song TED WHITE IF TED WHITE had lived in another century, he might have been one of that race of jongleurs and troubadours who sang their way through an age when there was little music in the world. The tenor voice which carries such an unusual quality through the ether, does not bring a false picture in the lilting romanticism of its tones. The youthful NBC singer who recently joined the staff of the San Francisco studios believes in what he sings. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, and close to six feet in height, Ted is the typical Southerner his slow, soft Tennessee accent betrays. He has all the courage of his Confederate ancestry, too, for if you'll press him, Ted speaks out and admits it — he likes to sing love songs ! "I suppose," he admits deliberately, "that I ought to get up and make gestures and say, 'I hate this romantic stuff!' but somehow I can't do it. The radio singer who reaches the hearts of his hearers gets something back from them which is very precious — and I don't mean letters of fulsome praise, either. He gets letters, it is true, but they are from persons to whom he has been able to give something, lonely, unhappy folk whom he has made forget their troubles for awhile, and his reward is to know that. "Sometimes I feel that the biggest boon radio has brought to the modern world is its ability to provide a confessional booth for tired souls. An elderly woman whose children have grown up and married and left her, sits before her radio and hears someone singing a song. "If the singer is a good singer, he makes her feel, together with several thousand other listeners, that the song is being sent through the ether straight to her. She feels young again; she forgets that she is alone, and when the song ends and she comes back to everyday life, she frequently sits down and empties her heart in a letter to the radio station. Things she never would confess to anyone; hurts she would not admit, old memories of happier days, well up and somehow get themselves written. She feels all the better for breaking down her emotional dam, and the radio singer who gets the letter reads it with reverence if he's a real artist." The majority of Ted's fan-letters are written by women, but that does not mean he doesn t appeal to masculine hearers also. "Men are the real sentimentalists at heart," he declares. "The most flattering letter I ever received in my life was the shortest one I ever read. It was from a man, and he said, 'I hate to writ eeltters, and have never written a fan-letter, but I can't listen to your singing any longer without saying— I thank you!' "I smiled over the letter and forgot it until, a month later, a man telephoned me. He was the writer and he had called to ask me to sing by Hollworth ^Nortot at his wife's funeral. That staggered me a bit but of course I had to say yes, and I spent a worried evening trying to find something for such an occasion. I finally found a little song by Schubert — 'Adieu.' I sang it and then rushed back to the studio just in time for my program." The ability to send a love-song through the microphone in such a manner that it touches the hearts of those who hear it, isn't such a simple trick, Ted admits. To "sing the soul of a song" as his admirers say he does, the singer has to keep emotionally detached, he believes. "The microphone is an amazingly sensitive mechanism— sensitive not only to sounds, but to every emotion in its vicinity. Nervousness, fear, unhappiness, anger in the radio performer are perceptible to every listener, which is why singing into a microphone is different from singing on the stage." Ted came to radio straight from a profession whose followers are not noted for their sentiment — the newspaper business. Born in Athens, Tennessee, the son of a physician there, the NBC tenor never took his voice seriously until singing virtually was forced upon him. He took a pre-medical course, intending to follow his father's vocation, then changed his mind and decided to become a newspaper man. Graduated from Columbia University — he never even sang in the Glee Club there because he didn't know he could sing — he joined the forces of the United Press. ( Continued on Page 42 ) RADIO DOINGS