Hello everybody, this is the King of Rock and Roll, Alan Freed with a choral rock and roll dance

party and the big beat in popular music in America.

So gather the gang around for a rock and good time with our own big rock and roll bands.

If it weren't for Alan Freed, we certainly wouldn't call it rock and roll, and we probably

would have a very different take on what popular music is supposed to sound like.

Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

Alan Freed lived a heroic, short, and controversial life in the public eye.

Many people credit him with popularizing the term rock and roll.

He nurtured and built the careers of many artists.

His show, which would have been a total breakthrough for him on television, turning him into the first Casey Kasem-slash-Dick Clark, was canceled after four weeks because it featured a black musician dancing with a white woman.

But what Alan Freed is best known for is wrecking his career by doing something that curators have

been doing since the beginning of time. In 1959, he got in trouble with the law and ultimately

kicked off the airways for payola. Payola, not illegal at the time, was the common practice

of record labels paying DJs to feature their songs.

It mattered because DJs determined what was going to get listened to. There were only a few

radio stations in every town. There was no Spotify, there was

no YouTube, there was no serious. All there were were a few radio stations in every town. A song

that didn't get played, didn't get heard, and a song that didn't get heard didn't get bought.

And so it was a sensible thing for a record label to pay the program directors and the DJ. Unfortunately for

Alan Freed, people who weren't crazy about rock and roll and people who thought that the

curating DJ should be an independent agent decided to put an end to it. There were congressional

hearings. There were laws, and Alan Freed's

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