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Processing and cleaning the material, June 2007

Tom Mellor and Chas Collins
I Wouldn't Leave my Little Wooden Hut for You
Music Collection
MUS Flynn N 3/772

Ern Pettifers
Arrangement of Tom Mellor and Chas Collins' I Wouldn't Leave my Little Wooden Hut for You!
Music Collection
MUS Flynn N 3/772

First violin part for arrangement of Ernest Charles' When I Have Sung my Songs
Music Collection
Mus Flynn N 2/D1-35

Violin arrangement for Them was the Days, with doodles
Music Collection; MUS Flynn N Series 3/701

The Golden Age of Radio: The William Flynn Collection

In the golden age of radio, gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in evening dresses, all done up to the nines, graced broadcasting studios. You could not see how elegant they were but somehow an aura of classiness found its way onto the airwaves. A fine contralto, ‘The Lady in Black’ went to air in a mask so that the live studio audience would not recognise her, giving Australia ‘I’ve wined and dined on Mulligan Stew and never asked for turkey …’ in oleaginous, unexpectedly English tones. Listeners conjured visions of those who entertained them from the black-and-white images in radio periodicals. It is difficult to imagine radio weaving quite the same magic today.

Television was yet to arrive in Australia; yet to disrupt what was often an urbane, civilised ethos that included an in-house radio orchestra—a band of professional musicians ready to meet any musical challenge. Each day brought new requirements, and a team would fashion music to set or sustain a mood, music to accompany an operatic aria, or the latest flashy popular song. The radio station’s musical team often included composers and arrangers—mostly practical musicians who could make a fair fist of a clarinet or saxophone part, but whose experience meant that they were perfectly placed to write arrangements for the orchestra of which they were a part.

The National Library of Australia recently completed a collection management project in which a small team sorted, cleaned, described and re-boxed for appropriate storage and easy access 1631 individual items from the William Flynn/3DB Radio orchestral library. Fully word-searchable records have been created, and researchers are now discovering the rich store of cultural information that was for many years consigned to a dark corner of the music stacks.

The Flynn Collection is mostly a large collection of published scores and parts for a small orchestra—usually basic strings, woodwind, brass and percussion—and much of it has a vocal part. In addition there are numerous manuscript arrangements and manuscripts of original compositions, the remnants of an industry that metamorphosed in the 1960s and set aside its past in dusty storerooms.

The collection takes its name from the man who assembled and possibly even rescued it, at a time when most of the responsibility for mood was shifted to discs and tapes and what had customarily been performed live in the studio was scrapped in favour of commercial recordings of (mostly) international stars. Radio stations had, of course, always played commercial recordings, but the ‘big’ evening and weekend events had once been ‘live to air’ or specially recorded ‘live’ programs sponsored by toiletry, soap and cereal companies.

William Flynn, who died in 1981, commenced his career as a clarinet player. He worked with various ensembles, most notably with the orchestra of Melbourne radio station 3DB (1950–c.1970). He was widely recorded and released more than 50 long-playing records for the Spotlight Varieties, W & G, Astor and Polygram labels. His collection of recordings, now held by the National Film and Sound Archive, includes important 10- and 12-inch acetate recordings (made by Legionnaire Products) with Australian singer Marjorie Stedeford. Acetate recordings of Jack Davey and the Dunlop Radio Show are also mentioned in correspondence with the National Library at the time the collection was acquired. Flynn seems to have assumed ownership of the 3DB library when the radio station changed its broadcasting style.

Some of the names associated with 3DB and the Flynn material include performers such the South African-born pianist, Isadore Goodman. Manuscripts by familiar Australian composers such as Robert Hughes and William Lovelock are found in the collection, although it is difficult to be sure that they have any association with 3DB. Musicians such as Ern Pettifer, Joe Washington, Larry Kean and Joe Dunn figure prominently in the lists of arrangers.

Storage and movement of the collection in the 1960s and 1970s left it in no particular order that might have been useful to preserve, although there were numberings and markings that suggested groupings in which the material might have been held in the distant past. In order to facilitate access the collection has been broken down into six parts, each of these suggested by careful sorting and arranging of materials into like groups, and the logic of these divisions might preserve some trace of Flynn’s collecting. The first part comprises manuscripts of original compositions and arrangements by Flynn. The second and largest group is made up of published scores and parts of light classical and popular music, mainly of North American and English origin. Manuscript arrangements of vocal material especially made for 3DB form the third part, and the fourth is exclusively published vocal parts. The fifth group is of miscellaneous songs associated with Flynn, items which are clearly related to each other but which carry no distinctive markings that suggest they might be part of a larger group within the collection. The last group is composed of 3DB radio scripts and associated musical materials.

In sorting and describing the William Flynn/3DB material we have tried to understand how various components of the collection form distinctive groupings. Flynn gathered music from a variety of sources, but left no specific accounts of provenance for any of his collection. While sorting into comprehensible, manageable groups is sometimes straightforward, a future researcher will benefit from the logic of an imposed structure that begins to make sense of the chaos of items randomly boxed and having little or no external evidence of any former relationship within the group.

A researcher who chooses to use this material will discover important evidence of the transition from the ‘old’ world of radio broadcasting to the emerging era of ‘shock-jocks’ and ‘talkback’. They will also discover something of the decline of the golden age of Australian radio as television established its place, taking over many of the functions formerly served by radio.

Information about the contents of the Flynn Collection is accessible online in the National Library’s catalogue.

 

Dr Jeff Brownrigg
Special Projects Team Leader, Music and Dance