The Nightbird

In the 1970s, when I was young, all my friends and I listened to Alison Steele, the Night Bird who was the radio disc jockey on WNEW-FM out of New York.  She was really cool talking between the songs that she played and later she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  She got her start in radio around 1951 when she was 14.  There was an ad in her local paper looking for a tall good-looking girl to fill a part-time slot.  She said that she was neither tall nor pretty, but her mother told her to go and get it anyway.  She went down, bluffed her way in, then worked hard until she got it right.  On January 1st, 1968, WNEW placed Steele in the overnight “graveyard shift” which granted her more creative freedom, leading her to develop her on-air personality and rapport with her listeners.  Steele would begin her night show by reciting poetry over music, before introducing her show in her distinctive soft and sultry voice.  Her regular introduction was, “Hello night bird.  How was your day?  Did you visit the gods in the valleys far away?  What did you bring me, in your visit from the sea?  The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nightbird spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel.  Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird, at WNEW-FM, until dawn.”

I never stayed up till dawn listening to her show, but I did spend many late-night hours listening to her radio show.  By 1971, Steele had acquired approximately 78,000 nightly listeners, the majority being men between 18 and 34.  According to the February 17, 1974. edition of the Sunday News, she was the most successful female disc-jockey in the country.  In 1976, she became the first woman to receive Billboard Magazine’s “FM Personality of the Year” award.  According to Jimi Hendrix’s manager Michael Jeffery, the song ‘Night Bird Flying’, recorded by Hendrix and released posthumously on the 1971 album The Cry of Love, was inspired by Steele’s show.  Ms. Steele lived in Manhattan and died of cancer on September 27, 1995, at the age of 58.

Written for John Holton’s The Sound of One Hand Typing Writer’s Workshop, where today he gave us 6 choices again and I went with #1.

1. Write a post based on the word radio.
2. Write a post in exactly 11 sentences.
3. Tell us why you’re overjoyed that “the one that got away” got away.
4. Write a list of 5 or 10 sentences that begin with the words “no one ever asked me,” then, write about one of them in detail, or use them all in a poem, or use several in a personal description of yourself.
5. If you could change the alphabet, what would you do?
6. Tell us about a day you were sure you wouldn’t get through.