Choir Notes

Eighty Years of Music and the Spoken Word
From Music and the Spoken Word
Delivered By: Lloyd D. Newell

On a hot summer afternoon eight decades ago, a young announcer climbed a ladder in the Tabernacle on Temple Square and spoke into a borrowed microphone the opening lines of a new radio program from “the Crossroads of the West.” The broadcast that became known as Music and the Spoken Word was on the air.

After that first broadcast, the radio network president sent a telegram: “Your wonderful Tabernacle program made a great impression in New York. Have heard from leading ministers—all impressed by program. Eagerly awaiting your next.”1 Little did he or anyone else know, that was only the first of well over 4,000 such broadcasts.

Despite its successful beginning, few could have predicted that 80 years later this beloved program would be eagerly awaited every week by listeners around the world. Music and the Spoken Word has become the world’s longest-running network broadcast. It is carried on more than 2,000 radio and television stations and cable systems around the world—in Denmark, for example, the program has been on the air for 30 years. It has been broadcast from venues throughout the United States and from Australia, Brazil, Russia, and Japan, to name only a few.

Sometimes it seems that we have little in common with people who lived 80 years ago, but this broadcast is an exception. Every week since 1929, like a trusted friend, it has lifted and comforted our spirits and encouraged one generation after another to focus on the things that matter most. Today’s challenges are different in some ways—the world seems more noisy and confusing than it once was—but we continue to find in Music and the Spoken Word a welcome reprieve, a beacon of hope, steadying troubled hearts and enhancing life’s joys. That’s why we look forward to the next inspiring program just as eagerly today as listeners did 80 years ago.

1 In J. Spencer Cornwall, A Century of Singing: The Salt Lake Mormon Tabernacle Choir (1958), 278.