Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 22, 1995 TAG: 9508220023
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You can listen to books on tape available at bookstores and libraries throughout the New River Valley. Even better, you can hear stories dramatized on tapes of old 30-minute radio shows available at some of the odds-and-ends stores in the region.
No longer do I think of a trip from Wytheville to Roanoke as an hour and a half. I think of it as an "Our Miss Brooks," a "Green Hornet" and a "Jack Benny." It seems much shorter that way.
But recently, driving through Pulaski County, I was listening instead to a classical music tape I'd found on sale that included Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture." All of a sudden, I thought I was listening to radio's "Lone Ranger."
You'd probably have to be of an age to have been exposed to that radio series as a child every Monday, Wednesday and Friday night to be that familiar with its bits of bridge music between scenes. By the time I'd finished listening to "Hebrides," I'd heard three such transitions.
Yes, everybody associates the "William Tell Overture" with that masked cowboy character. But the radio show lifted other public-domain segments as well. That recognition with the "Hebrides Overture" was not the first of its kind for me. The same thing has happened when public radio has played Lizst's "Les Preludes," Wagner's "Rienzi Overture," Dvorak's "New World Symphony" and Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture," among others.
You late-comers who remember only Clayton Moore's version of the Lone Ranger on television won't have shared that experience. William Tell carried over to the TV series, but not the other classical pieces. Most of the TV music, in fact, seems to have been lifted from the B-Westerns I used to attend each weekend as a kid.
Obviously, the radio show was better for my cultural education. You don't get quite the same respect by recognizing, say, some action music from one of John Wayne's "Three Mesquiteers" flicks as identifying Suppe's "Light Cavalry Overture."
If that doesn't impress you, the Lone Ranger music is now the subject of scholarship. Virginia author Reginald M. Jones Jr. has published "The Mystery of the Masked Man's Music: A search for the Music Used on The Lone Ranger Radio Program, 1933-1954" (Scarecrow Press, P.O. Box 4167, Metuchen, N.J. 08840).
Talk about dedication: Jones spent a quarter of a century tracking down the origins of the musical bits and pieces from the radio show. Even some of that Republic Pictures action music ended up on radio, apparently as part of the deal where the program's creator allowed the character to be used in a couple of movie serials.
Fascination with such music may seem outlandish, if you're not one of those who heard it three nights a week for many years. But some has turned up in recent documentaries on the Arts & Entertainment and the American Movie Classics cable TV channels. On top of that, Fred Foy, longtime narrator of the radio show, has narrated his own recollections of the experience titled "Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch ..." (available from him at P.O. Box 239, Reading, Mass. 01867, $8.95 on cassette and $14.98 on CD plus $1.50 postage). It also passes the time nicely while driving. The Lone Ranger does, indeed, ride again.
Paul Dellinger covers Pulaski County for The Roanoke Times' New River Valley bureau.
by CNB