To celebrate Morning Edition's 35th birthday, BJ Leiderman tells the story of how an aspiring dropout's jingles led to the song most of us wake up to. (Did you know there were even lyrics?)
35 years ago today, NPR aired Morning Edition for the first time.
To celebrate, we thought we’d talk with NPR composer BJ Leiderman, whose name you hear at the end of most of your favorite shows: Morning Edition and All Things Considered (duh), along with Marketplace, Weekend Edition, Car Talk, and Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
We started with a theoretical question: If Morning Edition were a person, what would Morning Edition be like?
“Morning Edition,” says Leiderman, “is a semi well-adjusted, well-rounded, deep and beautiful person. And it has shown restraint in its voice. It hasn’t yelled since the Carter administration.”
35 years ago, BJ Leiderman was, as he puts it, “Minding my own business flunking out of American University.” He was a broadcast journalism major. But he also had a side gig.
“I was doing jingles. Anyone who wanted a jingle, you know.”
Airlines, bacon, milk, you name it.
Leiderman was also friends with Skip Pizzi, an engineer at NPR. He gave a demo tape of his jingles to Pizzi, who handed them off to the guy in charge of making Morning Edition happen.
“I guess he thought that these things were catchy, because he told Skip to get in touch with me, and Skip did. He said, ‘Do you want to demo for a new morning news show?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And I worked on a little cheesy keyboard called a Kumar, which had a cheesy piano sound, a cheesy bass, a cheesy horn section, and cheesy strings.. and I put together a 4-track demo on a reel to reel tape recorder.”
(For those of you who are younger than Morning Edition, you might want to Google reel-to-reel tape recording.)
“The demo theme was basically a melody with some bass under it, and that was all fine. But when I started having creative meetings with Jay Kearnis he would say, ‘You know, the best I can say, BJ, is that most of these member stations are coming out of classical music programming. It’s gonna be 5 or 6 in the morning. Let’s not jar them awake. This is no Reveille deal. It’s a gentle ‘the sun is coming up’ type feeling. This is NPR. We’re not paying him much. Let’s put it in the contract that we have to give him an on air credit.’”
To hear the rest of the story, including the little-known lyrics to the Morning Edition theme, listen to the sound file above.
BJ Leiderman is playing this Friday at the White Horse Black Mountain 6th Anniversary concert.
Morning Edition hosts across the country took pictures of themselves in their studios today. See the member-station team, and other birthday wishes and paraphernalia, by following #MEBDAY35 on Twitter.