WHN: Proof that Schlock Sells

Schlocky music came in all forms during the Seventies, but if you wanted to find it in concentrated doses while in NYC the best place to tune your dial was 1050 AM - WHN, which was at the time our town's country music station.

Before the Johnny Cash fans out there start getting mad, please let me explain that most of the stuff you heard on WHN was not real country music - Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, and the like. And certainly country music didn't have the monopoly on schlock; let us not forget "Disco Duck." But for some reason the Seventies produced a huge number of wretched stupid C and W tunes like "Convoy," "Phantom 309," "I Think Jamaica in the Moonlight" (sung with a pseudo Jamaican accent!) and the immortal "Teddy Bear" - a talking record about a handicapped boy who communicates with truckers via CB radio. WHN played them all faithfully. If you recall these tunes, you will note that many had trucker themes, and that was probably the only thing that tied them to the country genre, except perhaps that they were...errr...sung...by white guys with Southern accents. Some of the stuff was so bad that you wondered how anyone took it seriously. But not only would  thousands of people purchase records like "Teddy Bear" during the allegedly cynical Seventies, but they'd go out and get the sequels - in this case "Teddy Bear's Mom," another talker in which a woman tells the story of the sick child's mother after he dies (the big rigs lined up for miles at the cemetery). As somebody who had worked at a summer camp with handicapped kids, I found such stuff sickening, as did everyone else I knew.  But obviously somebody was buying those records! Listening to WHN was a lesson in sociology; you realized that there were vast numbers of really simple-minded folks out there. And no, these people did not all
reside in the back woods; they were your neighbors!

One partial reason why people listened to WHN was that at the time many car radios could not receive FM, and there were still a number of AM stations. In addition, car stereos were very expensive, and thefts were very common. For many of us, there were few options. As time went on, however, FM radios and tape players did become more or less standard equipment, and AM radio became devoted almost exclusively to talk. AM 1050 became the frequency for ESPN, the sports station. As for country and western, there were several failed attempts to start stations played devoted to this music on FM: WKHK, and then WYNY. Neither lasted.