Recording history

Photos by Jerry Hale

Moran's 96,653 recordings are stored, organized and instantly accessible on his computer.

Among the well-known entertainers, athletes and musicians who spoke into Dave Moran's microphones: Johnny Carson, Loretta Lynn and Cale Yarborough.

Dave Moran's microphones are displayed above the bar in the great room of the Moneta house he shares with wife Sharon.

Dave Moran has a music library to die for.

Lakers who listened to the radio decades ago in southwest Virginia might recognize a voice from their past. Moran, 66, was a disc jockey first, during his high school years in the early '60s, at Salem's WBLU. Then, he was on the air at WBRG as he worked his way to a degree in economics and business from Lynchburg College; and post-college at Roanoke's WROV, a premier rock 'n' roll station.

Moran's on-the-air experience led him to a job selling radio time for several area stations and eventually to the purchase of Lynchburg's WVZN (later WLNI-105.9 "The Line") in 1982. He eventually expanded his mini-network to six broadcasting outlets over the ensuing 10 years -- two in Virginia and two each in North and South Carolina.

Providing on-air patter between the playing of hit recordings came easy to Moran, a Salem native who lives with wife Sharon on a quiet cove near the mouth of Gills Creek in Moneta.

"My first radio job was 'clean-up kid' -- sweeping studio and office floors," Moran recalled. "Fascinated by the idea of being on-air, I managed to wangle a few seconds of speaking time every now and then. Before long, I was doing swing shifts in the off-hours. I took to it naturally, and my passion for broadcasting grew out of that."

Deeply ensconced in the "broadcasting biz," Moran had access to a steady stream of popular music. He decided early on that he'd like to establish a library of the tunes he was spinning for listeners.

But unlike former boppers who may have a couple hundred 45s stashed in the attic, a drawer full of LPs and a rack of CDs, Moran used station-grade music-cataloging software to store his growing collection. He's still at it.

A computer server tucked under the music library desk in his lake home contains, he says, a digital version of "nearly every notable Top 40 recording beginning with the 1940s," he said.

Moran's collection of chart toppers contains more than 96,650 recordings. Among them are 765 Beatles tunes, 32 by Robert Goulet, 148 by Jimmy Buffet, 50 by Bill Monroe and 36 by Lady Gaga.

The cataloging software can instantly determine that there are 6,464 songs with the word "love" in the title, and only 157 with "hate," Moran said. "Maybe there's hope for humanity yet," he joked.

"I can set it to play all the recordings by a given artist or random selections from any of hundreds of categories," Moran said.

If asked to play through the entire collection, the system would play day and night for eight months without a repeat.

"That would, of course, include renditions of the same song recorded by several different artists in some cases," Moran noted.

It would also include some highly collectible novelty recordings. One of Moran's most-prized recordings features the late comedian and talk show host Johnny Carson singing a duet with Pearl Bailey, a guest on his show who coaxed him into joining her for "Our Love Is Here to Stay."

"It sounds awful," Moran said. "But it's a terrific piece of broadcasting history."

And he continues to add history to his collection. "I'm still active in radio station management," he said. "That involvement provides access to the music being played today."

And how does he guard against losing all that precious music to a server crash or other electronic glitch?

"I have a friend who maintains a similar collection," he replied. "We routinely back up one another's files."

Recordings are not all Moran collects.

Shelves placed high up along the wall of their great room's bar area display Moran's collection of nearly 30 microphones from radio's heyday.

His most prized is a Sure 5565 -- known in the industry as an "Elvis Mic" -- which he used to interview celebrities from the sports and entertainment world, including James Brown, Ozzy Osbourne, Johnny Cash, Cale Yarborough, The Statler Brothers, Little Richard and Tom Jones.

With heritage music being popular in this area, a regular string of country/western and bluegrass artists came to town as well. Maybelle Carter, Loretta Lynn, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs also were interviewed using the prized Elvis-style microphone.

Moran said his interview with Carson was among his most fascinating.

"It was in the '70s," Moran recalled. "Carson was doing a show with [trumpeter/band leader] Doc Severinsen in Greensboro. I interviewed Carson in his dressing room before the show. He was at the peak of his career, and I was in awe. But Johnny couldn't have been nicer -- just an ordinary guy. He was cordial, forthcoming, a real gentleman who treated me like an equal."

The time period spanned by Moran's microphone collection is bookended by a 1920s "Little Wonder" -- a toy kids could plug into the family radio and pretend they were on the air -- and an RCA DX 77, the same type used by Larry King today.

"I love having all this music nostalgia in the house -- I absolutely love it," said Sharon, who met Dave at Salem's Andrew Lewis High School.

"It's a great curiosity to visitors and provides wonderful background for entertaining. We can create a playlist appropriate to a dock gathering, dinner party or just for background when we're relaxing around the house," she added.

"My dad was a big radio fan," Dave Moran said. "In my earliest memories, the radio was always playing at our house."

In a sense, it still is.