For an hour every Monday through Saturday starting in 1949, a Black man’s smooth hip voice could be heard on the radio as a sweet saxophone played in the background.
“Oooo-wee! This is Dr. Daddy-O. Jackson Brewing Company and Dr. Daddy O want you to move right on in before that time gets too thin and treat yourself to a real friendly light-tasting swallow of Jax Beer. …brought to you every night about this time on that jock-the-cat station, that WWEZ station. That Carnival City station in New Orleans, Lou-zoozy-woozy ana! Good goodness above!”
The voice belonged to New Orleans’ first Black disc jockey Vernon Winslow.
According to Tulane University, Winslow “transformed his career from a conservative university art instructor to a broadcasting novice who boasted the highest-rated radio show in the city.”
Born in Ohio in 1911, Winslow moved from Chicago to New Orleans in 1938 to teach art at Dillard University. In 1947, he proposed to host a radio show featuring “jump blues, boogie woogie, New Orleans music and other ‘jive’ recordings,” Bala James Baptiste wrote in “Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans.”
He was hired at WJMR to train white announcers to “talk convincingly in hip Black dialect,” according to Baptiste, but he was not allowed to go on air.
In 1949, Jackson Brewing Company hired him to promote Jax Beer. Its advertising agency negotiated with WWEZ for him to host “Jivin’ with Jax.” As the first radio program catering to Black listeners, it “recognized the value of Black dollars and advertising power in the Jim Crow South,” curator Melissa A. Weber said during the 2023 webinar, “Jivin’ with Dr. Daddy-O: Race, Radio and Representing Black in Jim Crow New Orleans.”
Winslow, who remained on air until the 1980s, “would become a major player in Black music radio,” Baptiste wrote. Winslow died in 1993 at 82.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.