Guest Mixtape: Midnight Radio

The idea of midnight radio is specific: a format that existed in the American South and Midwest when local AM stations signed off and the powerful clear-channel stations carried further, pulling in listeners from hundreds of miles away who would not otherwise have heard what was playing.

The midnight radio sound was country, gospel, soul, R&B — whatever the big stations were playing when the transmitters had their full range. It was music arriving from somewhere else, often unexpected, often the best music you heard all week.

This guest mixtape takes that as its concept and builds a sequence around it.

The format

The guest mix at When You Awake is a listening essay with a described sequence. The selector put this one together over a couple of weeks, starting with the concept and finding the music that fit it.

The sequence is late-night music: slower tempos, more spacious production, songs that carry the quality of distance. It is not background music. Midnight radio was not background music. It was the thing you listened to when you had the radio to yourself.

What's in the sequence

The mix opens with a country ballad from the late 1960s, the period when Nashville was at its most orchestrally ambitious and the results were either catastrophic or magnificent. This one is magnificent.

The middle section crosses through soul music and back into country, through the productions that drew the two traditions toward each other in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Muscle Shoals is in here somewhere. So is a Bobbie Gentry record.

It ends with something current — a contemporary Americana recording that sounds like it belongs in the sequence without being nostalgic about it.

For more guest mixes: Guest Mixtape: Other Countries and Guest Mixtape: Grand Ole Echo's Roots Roadhouse. Full Mixtapes index.