No time to read? Listen to the podcast.

If you’re a normal, American person with normal, American hearing, there are three songs you can’t get out of your head: Pomp and Circumstance; It’s a Small World After All; and the jingle for the radio station you grew up listening to, back in the days when there were radio stations.

Sir Edward Elgar is responsible for the first. For the second, thank Disney songwriters Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman. The honor of third place goes to Bill Meeks.

Before you dash out and write him a thank-you note (or death threat), there’s something you need to know. Meeks didn’t mean to tie up your brain cells with jingles, even though that’s how things worked out. He was in it to make money.

Although that didn’t work out too well, either.

According to Jonathan Wolfert, founder and president of the country’s largest jingle producer, JAM Creative Productions, “As early as 1947, station identification jingles were used by KLIF in Dallas, Texas. One of the musicians working on KLIF was Bill Meeks. In addition to leading two bands that performed live on the station, Meeks also sold commercial time to the shows’ sponsors. He participated in creating commercials and jingles for those sponsors.”

Sponsor jingles were an old idea, dating back to the early days of network radio. “In 1933, when Jack Benny was on the air, his little band of musicians and singers, like Dennis Day, would sing jingles for Lucky Strike,” Ken Deutsch, a jingle historian and former jingle producer, told me.

Once in a while, the house bands might play a little jingle for the station itself.

These jingles were popular, especially with station owners, because they helped listeners remember what station they were tuned to. And that was music to the owners’ ears. In order for stations to get credit in the ratings, listeners had to positively identify the station, which usually meant recalling the call letters, slogans, or names of programs. Jingles worked to etch these into listeners’ minds.

In the mid-1950s, Meeks had a marketing brainstorm. Why not record the music for a jingle once, and sing it with different call letters? That would spread the most expensive part of a jingle, the music, across dozens of clients, and practically any station could afford to set its call letters to music. Meeks started selling jingles through his company, PAMS, and with that the modern jingle business was born.

And, just in time.

A few years later, Top 40 blared forth from radios across America.  “Once people like Todd Storz and Gordon McLendon started using radio IDs on influential stations like WOW in Omaha, and KLIF in Dallas they became a part of the Top 40 culture,” Deutsch said.

Jingles and Top 40 were made for each other.

It wasn’t unusual to find two, three, or in larger cities, four stations all with Top 40 formats. “Setting the station call letters to music made them more memorable,” Wolfert said. And, just as in the 30s, memorable meant higher ratings. “Basically, jingle companies were selling letters of the alphabet.”

As the jingle business exploded PAMS became a giant vacuum cleaner that sucked in money. Unfortunately, Meeks wasn’t the world’s best businessman. As fast as the money came in, he spent it. And then some.

“Eventually he got in trouble with the I.R.S.,” Deutsch recalled, “and they shut him down.” Collectors, and a handful of would-be producers, scrambled to exploit the PAMS music tracks, assuming they were up for grabs.

But Meeks left PAMS so quickly, he forgot one thing. He never legally shut the company down. Wolfert, who had worked for PAMS, paid back the taxes and other fees and, after a few years of legal wrangling, JAM acquired all the rights to PAMS and its classic radio station jingles.

“Some of those jingles are still in use today,” Wolfert said. “We’re still singing new versions for stations using the original PAMS tracks.”

But even if you don’t hear them on the radio, those brain cells of yours won’t let go.

“I have been to different events and I’ve spoken on panels,” Deutsch said, “and people can sing these jingles back to me. Forty years since they’ve heard them. It’s just unbelievable.”

Today’s jingles are shorter than those of the 1960s, and focus on a station’s marketing slogan as well as its call letters. But no matter what your religion, economic status, ethnicity, or gender, jingles did, and still do, spread through the population as rapidly as viruses. And are equally hard to get out of our systems.

When it comes to letters set to music, it’s still a small world, after all.

A tip of the hat to Allan Sniffen of www.musicradio77.com for helping to get this story off the ground.

Courtesy of Jonathan Wolfert

Courtesy of Ken Deutsch