CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett introduces a 1937 CBS Radio clip from Saturday Night Swing Club featuring famed journalist Edward R. Murrow. Murrow is not the program’s host (the show’s announcer was Mel Allen) but narrates a musical interlude. Garrett notes this is a lighter moment from before World War II and reminds listeners that radio then dominated entertainment and was experimenting with technologies that could unite 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!
Major Garrett frames the clip as a brief, buoyant flashback ahead of Murrow’s later, more somber wartime broadcasts.