NONFICTION - Feb. 23, 1992

WHEELIN’ ON BEALE: How WDIA-Memphis Became the Nation’s First All-Black Radio Station and Created the Sound That Changed America by Louis Cantor (Pharos: $19.95; 264 pp.). “Get up outa that bed, children, and put them clothes on! I know you want to go back to sleep, but you can’t do that. Don’t worry me, now. Don’t aggravate me. Y’all hear me!?” That was how Brother Theo Wade roused listeners to his early morning Delta Melodies radio show on Memphis’ WDIA during the ‘40s and ‘50s, but it could just as well serve as a metaphor for the role WDIA played in that city’s black community. At a time when no other station would deign to program to African-Americans, WDIA offered encouraging voices to buoy spirits on Beale Street, a center of black community whose warmth is reminiscent of the avenues celebrated in Spike Lee films. “It gave you a laugh,” WDIA’s wizardly first announcer Nat D. Williams said of the street, “it gave you a cry, or it gave you a funeral . . . I’d rather be there than any place I know!”

Cantor, a (white) history professor who worked the WDIA control board while in college, writes with such verve that the bittersweet crooning of WDIA performers like Bobby Blue Bland seems to resound from his pages. Cantor’s only notable failing is a subtle and subconscious form of condescension: a tendency to sketch WDIA’s staff in superhuman proportions rather than to celebrate the genuine heroism of their real lives. He writes, for example, that Nat Williams would get up at 5 a.m., broadcast from 6:30 to 8, teach until 3:15, edit the school newspaper, host an afternoon radio show, lead the Boy Scout troop, read the Bible and “one or two books every night” and write weekly newspaper columns: “And write he did! His messages offered meaning to the highbrow and lowbrow alike. Though his thoughts were profound and erudite, he was always careful to speak in the colloquial. . . .”

Some will fault WDIA for failing to rouse Memphis blacks politically: It broadcast no truly muckraking programming. But while WDIA may not have brought on a new era, its announcers’ wise, stoical humor helped Memphis blacks live in the present one. Explaining how he managed to work eight hours daily over a boiling vat and then assume the carefree demeanor of his on-air persona (“The world’s oldest teen-ager”), deejay Rufus Thomas laughs during an interview with the author and says, “I’ve always worked several jobs to try to make ends meet, and every time I think I’ve got my ends to meet, somebody comes up and moves the ends.”