Abstract

In this project I theorize the work of Mary Margaret McBride who hosted a number of shows on American network radio from 1934-1954. On her genre-defying programs, McBride chatted in a casual and unscripted way with guests, fluidly discussing both their professional and personal lives. McBride’s relationship with her listeners was characterized by feelings of closeness, trust, loyalty and intimacy (Ware, 2005). I connect McBride’s relationship with her fans to radio history and theory, especially certain ‘media fantasies’ (Verma, 2012) of the early twentieth century in which radio was understood as a particularly important medium for fostering connection, community, and democracy (Loviglio, 2005; Marvin, 1988; Mosco, 2004; Peters, 1999).

I present findings from my archival research at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. In my analysis, I follow Neil Verma (2012) and John Barnhurst and Kevin Nerone (2001), and focus on the form of McBride’s program. I investigate what her program sounds like, and how and why did it fostered such close personal connections between listeners, guests, and McBride. My research suggests a number of factors which may have contributed to the atmosphere of gendered familiarity evident in McBride’s work. I argue that McBride’s embrace of magazine format, innovative advertising techniques, use of pace and audioposition (Verma, 2012), combined with the fluidity and non-segmentation of her show, constructed an audio media context in which listeners felt connected to each other, to McBride, and to the products she promoted, constituting an emergent structure of feeling (Williams, 1977).