Vintage Radio Archive: The Lone Ranger, Abbott & Costello, and Bob Hope

This web page does­n’t look like much, but it hous­es a great deal. Put sim­ply, the page plugs you into an archive of 135

vin­tage Amer­i­can radio shows, span­ning from the 1930s to the 1950s. This was the height of Amer­i­ca’s radio days. And when you lis­ten to the record­ings, it won’t take long to real­ize that Amer­i­ca was a very dif­fer­ent coun­try then (polit­i­cal­ly, social­ly and cul­tur­al­ly) than what it is today. The list fea­tures some well-known clas­sics. Take for exam­ple, the Abbott and Costel­lo Show, Bob and Ray Show, Bob Hope Show, Burns and Allen Show, Mel Blanc Show and Mil­ton Berle Show (detect a pat­tern yet?). Then, you can also lis­ten in on episodes of Gun­smoke, Jack Ben­ny, The Lone Ranger, The Cis­co Kid, Father Knows Best and the Adven­tures Of Philip Mar­lowe. For those who want to expe­ri­ence the clas­sics of old-time Amer­i­can radio, or what main­stream Amer­i­can enter­tain­ment used to be, this audio archive should keep you busy for a good long while.

Relat­ed Web­site: Anoth­er col­lec­tion of vin­tage radio audio clips can be found here.

Relat­ed Arti­cle: Radio fans should look back at our arti­cle on the famous Orson Welles radio broad­cast from 1938 — The War of the Worlds. Read­ers can access here an audio file of the orig­i­nal broad­cast that sent the US into hys­ter­ics. It’s well worth a lis­ten if you haven’t heard it before.