INSIDETHEGATESRADIO.COM
  • Home
  • About
  • Player
  • FAQ
  • Blog
  • Privacy
  • Contact
  • Orders
  • Special Artist DJ Shows
  • Replay Live DJ Shows
  • Slides
  • Remotes
  • Home
  • About
  • Player
  • FAQ
  • Blog
  • Privacy
  • Contact
  • Orders
  • Special Artist DJ Shows
  • Replay Live DJ Shows
  • Slides
  • Remotes
Search

News from Inside The Gates Radio

DJ Dinnis Keefe is Making Sense Out of Songs on Inside The Gates Radio

11/1/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture




​“Jean, all the sounds that child makes, I can’t tell if I’m hearing him, the radio or the TV. You best find somebody to give him a bunch of money for that.”  That was my southern grandmother’s counsel to my mother on my first questionably creative vocalizations as I tried to mimic the sounds and character voices of my favorite cartoons. Thus began my lifelong journey into sitting in front of microphones.
 
Perhaps it was somehow genetic that I would spend a good deal of my work life in broadcasting. My mother was a fixture in what has come to be called “The Golden Age of Radio.” She got her start on Atlanta’s pioneering radio stations WGST and WSB. In those days, performances on radio were LIVE. Music, drama, news, interviews and commentary had to be performed in-the-moment and sent straight into the ether with no chance for editing. My mother’s singing partner on air – Atlanta native Bert Parks – brought her to the attention of NBC executives in New York, and she joined the nightly network forays into American homes nationwide.
 
Through my childhood and teen years, our home in Atlanta became a Southern rally point for her former broadcasting cronies. I could return home from school to find our living room crowded with musicians, actors, broadcasting and voice talent, industry executives and general creative riff-raff. Radio was still a dominant power in that day, and these folks instilled in me an awe of the “Voice in the Night.”
 
After I completed my education, I tried to break into radio on my own. In those days, there were no journalism studies that had a broadcasting emphasis, so the common path was to somehow garner the basic vocal skills, grasp enough tech expertise to pass an FCC license test...and then go find a job. Said job was usually way out in the cornfields somewhere and consisted of giving the weather and farm report to the cows, chickens and occasional farm hand.
 
I finally managed to find a broadcasting school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that was attached to a functioning station. It was a year-long course, and at the end, I managed to cadge a job at the station for the dark of night. About a year of that -- and in the dead of winter -- and I was ready to head back south.
 
Almost a year of job apps passed with no takers, but the warmer South that I had run to the previous winter happened to have one of the worst ice storms in its history the year of my return. The whole city of Atlanta was just frozen to a stand-still.
 
One of the major radio stations in the market was an all-news, all-talk, 24-hour station about five miles from our house. As I listened, I realized that the only folks there to maintain their high-intensity format were a few overnight folks, and by the second day, they were burning out. So, with the unshakable confidence of youth, I slogged the 4.5 miles (mostly sliding on my derriere) to the door of the station. A relentless pounding on the door brought a burned-out wraith of a news announcer to the door, who greeted me with a pleasant, “Whaddyawant-we’reclosed- goaway!” I told him I was an out-of-work announcer and I thought they might need some help during this emergency. He yanked me in by my collar and sat me in front of a mic and said, “Read this.” I blundered through a standard teletype UPI printout of the day, and two minutes into it, another collar yank planted me in front of a live mic. He gave me a card with the station I.D. and introduction blurbs, the latest newscast, and he shut the door. Thirty-seconds later, the red light came on and I charged in.
 
I stayed there for two-and-a-half days, emptying the snack machines and snagging naps on couches and chairs. When the thaw allowed the real pros back in, I was thanked, patted on the head, and turned out...but not before I had secured the promise of a reference from one of the staff. I think that, without their “any-port-in-a-storm” desperation for a warm body and a semi-coherent voice, I never would have broken in to that industry.
 
But, the guy was as good as his word, and with his reference and recommendation, I managed to get my start out with the cows, chickens and slowly-filling mudhole that became Lake Lanier on an AM daytimer. That led to several decades of jobs with stations in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Virginia and Washington, DC...and other places I’d rather not talk about.
 
When radio went relentlessly corporate in the late 80’s, I moved on to other enterprises, but I never lost the love of that “magic medium.”
 
Through the years, I have managed to keep my hand in by doing voice overs, audiobooks, narrations and the like. But that feeling of in-the-minute flowing communication that is radio was something I didn’t think I would ever get to experience again.
 
So…when the opportunity to build a streaming community radio station was presented to me, I enthusiastically joined Craig Looney in building Inside The Gates Radio here in Big Canoe. The station just celebrated its fifth anniversary, and we now have live programs seven evenings a week. My contribution to these live forays comes on Saturday evening and runs under the moniker, SongSense. I hope you will join me -- and all the ITG DJs -- “on the air” with lovingly-curated music, and the news and information of Big Canoe.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    July 2019

    Categories

    All
    Quizzes
    Station News

    RSS Feed

Download on the App Store
Click to set custom HTML
Android app on Google Play
Click to set custom HTML
The Best Music From the '60s  and beyond. 
​Our Vast Library Insures that Your Experience will Never be the Same.
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by Radio.co
  • Home
  • About
  • Player
  • FAQ
  • Blog
  • Privacy
  • Contact
  • Orders
  • Special Artist DJ Shows
  • Replay Live DJ Shows
  • Slides
  • Remotes