Audio Recordings – Jon Mark Davey

This is a page of audio recordings converted from old Reel to Reel tapes from Jon-Mark Davey collection.

The first section will be recordings I made at and for different radio stations and studios while working from 1968-1988. I recently found many reel to reel tapes with very early recordings from my radio days in Hot Springs Arkansas as a kid of 15. Most of the old radio announcements and commercials were recorded around 1970-71 while I was working at KZNG AM and KGUS-FM in Hot Springs. I also made intros, promos and commercials for friends n the business and commercial clients.

My professional career in broadcasting began at age 15, before I could drive. My mom had to drive me to work at KZNG in Hot Springs Arkansas, then pick me up after the show to take me home. Once I turned 16 I was able to get an old car to get me to work after school. I was the one and only “work study” student at Lakeside High School those years, or probably any time.

This audio track is one of the station promos I cut to promote our Weekend ’71 shows. I was 16 at the time. Once I got the red Mustang I started working at 1PM weekdays at KZNG then I worked the weekends at KGUS FM Saturday and Sunday night. I became a workaholic at a very young age. I used to sign off KZNG at midnight on Friday, sleep on the floor, then drive two blocks down the road to KGUS for a 6AM sign-on Saturday morning.

At age 16 I became an expert tape editor. When I was playing back the very old tapes in 2017 to bring these tracks back to life I mostly feared that the tape itself would have decayed. The recording tape was fine but many of the spliced and taped edits did not make it the almost 50 years into the future.

By the way, I was David St. Marks at KZNG and myself on KGUS. So many years later some of my high school friends still remember listening to me on the radio. My best friend at the time also became a radio announcer while in college and I made some of his intros and promos.

When I started working for WFTV-9 in Orlando at age 18 I was in the film department and didn’t work with audio for TV but I did some VOs for outside interests. A few years into my career in TV I became an on-air audio director and spent 8 hours a day working on live shows or pre-recording VOs or other audio productions.

One show where I was the audio director was the daily produced Bozo show. Yep, the Bozo show. For one hour each day I got to be a big kid and help dream up goofy stuff to air on the show. One of the main events on the show was a gerbil race where Bozo would put 3 gerbils in a race track, start them together, and see which one reached the end first. If the child contestant guessed the winner he was awarded a prize from one of the sponsors. It was my job to be creative and “dress up” the audio for the gerbil race so I eventually gave them personalities and voices where they sang and said all kinds of funny stuff, some lines were more parent oriented than 6 year old approved. These audio cuts were created between 1973-1976 in my personal home studio using 2 Sony 950 recorders and my own mics and equipment. All analog and linear.

This first cut is a stereo version, even though TV wasn’t stereo at the time, of Deck The Halls, with the Gerbil Tuckey Chorus from the Bozo show.

Jingle Bells – circa 1974-1975

Kermit the Frog, Jim Hansen of Muppet fame, was a guest on Bozo’s Bigtop show. I was able to capture a couple songs he sang during the program. See if you can remember these:

It’s not easy being green

Sing A Song

In the early years 1970s of being in broadcast radio, I was able to have facilities to record family whenever they traveled through. This next selection is a recording made circa 1970/71 in the recording studio at KGUS. This is sister Betty and Rick Strombeck with sons Ricky and Randy. Several songs are included in this recording.