KWEM Radio Station -

KWEM Playlist

The KWEM Story

KWEM Radio featured live music performance in the years from 1947 to 1955, a pay to play method generating revenue for radio stations who could not make enough money from conventional advertising sponsors and the spinning of records.Unknown artists who appeared on KWEM during the late 1940s and early 1950s were B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Scotty Moore, Stan Kessler, Warren Smith, Paul Burlison and Joe Hill Louis. All of these artists performed live on KWEM, and for many it was their first radio exposure.

When and where did rock & roll begin? It’s a simple question with a complex answer. Pop-music scholars often cite Memphis, Tennessee, home of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, as the place where rock & roll began in the 1950s. Hillbilly Boogie blows the cover off this myth. The book recounts the startling, true, and until now untold story of the birth of rock & roll.

“There is no better way to illustrate and tell the KWEM story than through appearances as the Snearly Ranch Boys,” Franklin reports. The band performs live at major venues and mixes fun, entertainment, excitement, history, and support of the KWEM effort by focusing attention on a lost, but not forgotten, legacy of the untold story of the birth of Rock & Roll.

The artists who will become the fabric of the electric blues are thriving in the “wide open” town of West Memphis, which has more than 30 gambling clubs for blacks and the two best gambling clubs for whites in a 200-mile radius. Eleventh Street was in the middle of “Juke Joint” heaven. Broadway was the main street of West Memphis.

KWEM Playlist

The KWEM Story

HillBilly Boogie

The “New” Ranch Boys

West Memphis, AR