CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett presents a 1937 audio excerpt from the Saturday Night Swing Club featuring Edward R. Murrow. Murrow is not the program’s host (the show’s announcer was Mel Allen); here he steps in to narrate a musical interlude. Garrett frames the clip as a lighter, pre‑World War II moment when radio dominated popular entertainment and was experimenting with technologies that could link performers and audiences across oceans.
[LIVELY SWING MUSIC]
EDWARD R. MURROW: And so we say good night to Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. They have been playing for you from the Bricktop Cabaret in Montmartre, Paris. This is Ed Murrow speaking and saying, swing it, America!
Garrett uses the excerpt as a brief, buoyant flashback to contrast with Murrow’s later, more somber wartime broadcasts, highlighting how different the tone of radio could be before the war transformed news and public life.