Saturday, August 23, 2008

Name the song contest from a reader

I remember a contest that ran just the first second or two of a song – sometimes just the first note (!) and the caller had to identify the song. The contest song nuggets were pre-produced onto tape, and the announcer could play the same “nugget” more than once if the caller was having trouble identifying the song. There were always the easy ones to identify, guaranteeing a winner.

But then there were the difficult ones – sometimes a very popular “oldie” that sometimes took several callers to get it right. The harder contests might span an hour or more by taking one caller at a time until someone finally got it right. The reward would be a prize, -AND- you got to hear the entire song from beginning to end.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A curious twist to the 'song fragment' contest: playing a clip of a given record backwards. Not all that easy if the snippet comes from something other than the song's hook.

This brings to mind a couple more contests from way back:

ZAP: The caller has to guess which of the station's call letters are replaced by a sonovox "ZAP" ... versions of all four combinations would be randomly placed onto one cart, and after the caller makes their guess, the next cut is played. If it matches, they win.

A small station in Selma, Ala. used to have a contest called "What's Cooking?" -- the jock would start reading one ingredient, adding another one after each record, and the object was to guess what the recipe was. I have a clip of one, and the callers had some awfully creative guesses.