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Behind the Scenes with Lex Gillespie, producer of Let the Good Times Roll
Interview conducted by Johanna Zorn
> When you started mapping out your ideas for Our Day Will Come did you
know what archival material you were looking for? Did you know that Martin
Luther King had spoken specifically on the subject of music and the civil
rights movement?
I first heard the King speech I used while working at the Smithsonian a few
years ago on another project and it worked great to set up the program. But I
had mixed results finding other archival to use in this program as well as the
rest of the series (Let the Good Times Roll). I tried, for instance, to find a
recording of a civil rights benefit concert with Ray Charles at Miles College
in Alabama in 1963 but struck out, having called the college and looked in
various archives. I used some archival sound of a Ku Klux Klan rally in
Birmingham to show the hostility towards outsiders coming to town, but that was
the only relevant sound I found.
In other cases, however, I easily found sound to match several stories I told,
including one in which Chicago R&B/Gospel artist Pops Staples recalls
writing a song after watching TV coverage of attempts to desegregate Little
Rock, Arkansas public schools in 1957. I found a President Eisenhower speech
about Little Rock on a collection of speeches of the 20th Century published by
Rhino Records.
> Where do you look for archival tape?
I've found archival tape in a variety of places, including people's private
collections. Old newsreels can work really well, because they were written in
such a dated, dramatic style. (They are located at the National Archives in
Maryland.) For the series Let the Good Times Roll, I looked for archival
interviews with musicians in a number of archives, at Columbia College in
Chicago, at Yale, and at Middle Tennessee State. But while these places may
have interviews of the musicians I wanted, the tape was often of bad audio
and/or editorial quality, so these archival visits didn't always pay off. Some
interviewers, for example, would use basic recording equipment and "step on"
the answers a lot. In one case, the interviewer was a '60s hippie with a
fascination for astrology and the first question she'd ask of everyone would
be: "So what's your sign?" That didn't work for me.
> You've produced many historically-based radio documentaries in your
career. How well-suited is radio for exploring historical events and themes?
Radio can work fine to explore historical events, although it's often a
challenge to find archival tape to flesh out a story, in addition to the
interviews or narration you use. Having (or not having) the archival tape can
determine what stories you tell. One time, for a program on early gospel music
on the radio, I found an elderly gospel singer in San Francisco who sang with
his group on the radio in 1927. He was a great interview and told harrowing
stories of touring during the era of Jim Crow from town to town in the Deep
South. But in the end we decided not to use the interview because we didn't
have any radio programs or music of his group back then to use along with it.
> Of the historical programs you've produced, do you have one that
stands out as your favorite because it adapted so well for radio?
I liked a piece I did for WBEZ's Chicago Matters called A Kind and Just Parent,
on the creation of the first juvenile court in the US, although it wasn't
necessarily the best to adapt for radio. The court was founded in Chicago in
1899, so obviously there was no recorded sound of the first gavel falling, or
anything else for that matter. So I had to use period music, sound effects and
actors reading from written accounts of the participants to tell the story.
Studs Terkel read the part of an activist Catholic priest named Father Timothy
Hurley who worked to keep teenagers out of adult jails. What I liked most about
it was that it felt almost like writing a play to tell the story. The tape
sounded good because the actors did such great readings of the printed
material, so I had greater control than if I merely did interviews.
> How did you decide which songs, and how much of each song, to include
in Our Day will Come?
This was the story of the political impact of R&B music, and in most
instances the particular song I picked came out of the interviews I used. There
were several '60s classics that had to be included: A Change is Gonna Come by
Sam Cooke, Otis Redding's Respect, and host Jerry Butler's Only the Strong
Survive. The program's first fifteen minutes is the story of Chicago's Staple
Singers, and the interviews I did with Pops Staples and his daughter Mavis
nicely set up the songs I used in that segment: Why (Am I Treated So Bad)? and
Freedom Highway. I knew both songs had good stories behind them, so I asked
them about the songs in the interviews. I always prefer whenever possible for
the interview tape to set up a song, rather than having the narrator do it.
> This program was the last in a 13-part series about rhythm and blues.
Did you end with this program for a particular reason?
Yes, there were two over-arching themes in the series. One was how R&B
influenced rock 'n roll. The second was the social impact R&B music had on
events of the day. The series covered the post-WWII period from 1945 to 1970,
from the beginnings of the civil rights movement to the passage of landmark
legislation during the 1960s. Throughout the series it touched on the civil
rights theme, but with the final program I wanted to bring it all together.
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