In the beginning, there was Symphony Sid...

Close enough, anyway. When Sidney Torin (1909-1984) came to Boston from New York City in 1951, he brought with him a taste for jazz and Latin music. He engaged in those twin passions as a disk jockey at WBMS radio, one of the area's jazz stations of that era.

Symphony Sid was born Sidney Tarnopol on New York's Lower East Side on Tuesday, December 14, 1909, and he grew up in Brooklyn. An early job involved selling classical records at the Symphony Shop. When he started as a jazz disk jockey at WBNX in the Bronx, he was given the moniker, Symphony Sid, and it stuck. He worked at a variety of New York radio stations, including the powerful WJZ. Leslie Gourse wrote in the August 8, 1971, issue of the New York Times that "he broadcast in the late forties and early fifties from the Three Deuces, the Royal Roost, Bop City and Birdland, all 52d Street jazz clubs. He helped at Birdland's opening, when Charlie Parker and Strings turned a four-week engagement into sixteen weeks." In fact, in the years that followed, Symphony Sid made quite a name for himself with his broadcasts from the original Birdland. He was the greatest jazz disk jockey of his times.

"While working as a broadcaster from Birdland over WJZ," wrote Leslie Gourse, "he was arrested and given a suspended sentence for having marijuana in his apartment."

After that, he couldn't get a job for more than a year, until his present boss, Norman Furman, hired him as a $75-a-week disk jockey in Boston. Boston was listening to Dixieland when Sid arrived. Five years later, when he left, after helping to promote the Newport Jazz Festival, Boston had about seven jazz clubs.

During his Boston days, Symphony Sid broadcast often from the city's jazz clubs, including the Hi-Hat and the Southland. Evidently his taste was quite broad. In addition to the jazz and Latin music that he favored, his WBMS broadcasts included rhythm and blues recordings--making Sid easily the best-known of the disk jockeys who introduced many New Englanders to "rock before it was called rock," as Ed Duato Scheer of the Love Dogs would say. Not much later, Ken Malden of WBMS also began broadcasting R&B records--and more of them. Thus, rock radio was born in Boston.

Symphony Sid hosted a gospel music show on WBMS. He actually split his time between two of Boston's radio stations. The other, WCOP, is generally remembered for its country music programming, and especially for the WCOP Hayloft Jamboree.

Symphony Sid returned to New York City in 1956. Late in life, he lived in Florida where he enjoyed the pursuit of fishing. Symphony Sid Torin died on Friday, September 14, 1984.

The spread in New England of early rock or proto-rock seems to be a bit of a mystery. There's good reason to believe that New Haven, Connecticut, was an early hotbed; and in Boston, of course, we know that Symphony Sid and Ken Malden got things going. Actually, I am reliably informed that a number of Boston disk jockeys, apprarently including the great territory-band leader Sabby Lewis, started working rhythm and blues recordings into their broadcasts in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Way off at WKBW radio in Buffalo, New York, George "Hound Dog" Lorenz was an early rock DJ. In the 1960s in Northern Maine, I used to listen to WKBW late at night; and I imagine New Englanders, who were blessed with such wonderful radio reception, were listening to WKBW and other far-off stations even back in the 1950s. I have clear memories of girls in Milo, Maine, who were already rock fans in the mid-'50s. And the older brother of one of my roommates at the University of Maine bought Elvis Presley's singles on the Sun Records label. Surely, then, rock was making inroads into New England, even beyond the big cities, at a fairly early date.

-- Alan Lewis, revised and redesigned March 15, 2002

Broadcast historian Donna L. Halper has contributed a great article about Early Boston Radio (1920-1925).

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