Radio great Jim Lowe dead at 93

He was one of New York’s legendary disc jockeys who also had a career as a singer best known for “The Green Door”.

Mr. Lowe brought the American songbook to generations of listeners on radio stations including WCBS, WNBC and, for more than two decades, WNEW. Nicknamed Mr. Broadway for his encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century American music and musical-theater trivia, he was heard on the NBC radio program “Monitor” and hosted “Jim Lowe’s New York” on WNEW for many years.

He was also a recording artist, mostly on Dot Records in the 1950s and ’60s. His records included “Gambler’s Guitar” (1953), a rockabilly song that he wrote, and a country version of Marvin Moore and George Campbell’s “Four Walls” (1957)…

Even though his own records were closer to Elvis than Ella, Mr. Lowe remained devoted to the American songbook long after many radio stations abandoned it for other formats.

“Unfortunately, the largest, most important city in the country doesn’t have a station with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Nat Cole and Sarah Vaughan,” he said in an interview with a Florida radio station in 2004, more than a decade after WNEW-AM was sold to Bloomberg and became a business-news station.

Mr. Lowe did his best to remedy the absence with his last radio show, “Jim Lowe and Friends,” recorded weekly at various New York jazz spaces and syndicated nationally. The show ended its run in 2004.

 

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.