Relatively Speaking

“Cousin Brucie” Morrow

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, April 28, 2011

If at first you can’t quite place the smiling face, the sweater might say “uncle” rather than “cousin.” But the sunny voice is a dead giveaway.

“I was what you’d call an ‘Alan Freed baby,’” he says, referring to the daddy of all rock ’n’ roll DJs, the one most often credited with taking African-American rhythm and blues to the white masses in the early 1950s. “As a teenager, I’d go up to WINS to watch him do his radio show. I’d bang my hand on the studio window and press my face up against the glass. I told him I wanted to be on the radio. But he told me [affecting a gruff voice], ‘Kid, this is a boring business. Take it from me, you don’t wanna do this. Go back downtown and work for your dad.’” He laughs. “But for some reason, even though he was my idol, I still didn’t listen to that advice.”

If he had, there’s no doubt the medium of radio—indeed, the story of popular music in America—would have been radically different. Because the speaker is “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, a broadcasting icon for more than 50 years and for multiple generations the very beacon of rock ’n’ roll’s biggest hits. Since coming into his own as the British Invasion struck land, for baby boomers Morrow has been, literally, the vocal champion who soundtracked the big break from the polite pop of their parents’ era and the staid culture that went along with it. As he tells it in his new book Rock & Roll… And the Beat Goes On (Imagine! Publishing, 2011), it was a schism that developed into rock’s many subsequent iterations. But before their hit songs became today’s “oldies” repertoire—a format Morrow has come to personify—the decades from the ’50s to the ’80s unspooled in a turbulent, perspective-shaping fashion. And as they did, “Brucie” was the omnipresent, genial gatekeeper. For most kids on their way to join the workforce, raise a family, and quietly assume the mantle of adulthood, the fun-filled hits of the day were simply that. For many, however, the Top 40 was something more. It was a steady stream of seeds that inspired them to dig deeper into music’s unheard, forbidden grounds—whether to find out more about where the new sounds came from, or simply to do something different than what they were hearing. And, in many cases, to go on to make their own music.

Morrow was born in Brooklyn in 1937 as Bruce Meyerowitz, the son of a Lower East Side children’s clothing manufacturer. “Brooklyn was one of the greatest places to grow up in,” the disc jockey recalls. “What made it so great was the diversity of the neighborhood. I got to know people of all races and financial and educational backgrounds.” While there was music in the house (“Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Mario Lanza, okay pop-era stuff, I guess.”), Morrow emerged as an entertainer-personality well before he became a music fanatic. “I was a shy kid,” he says, inconceivably. “Until my English teacher cast me in what they called a ‘hygiene play,’ which was something used to teach sex education, as well as more mundane health-related stuff. This one was about dental health, and I played a cavity! [Laughs.] But when I got on stage, something happened, and I loved it. Then one afternoon I saw my mom and the neighbors gathered around the radio, moved to tears by the news of FDR’s death. The way radio could reach people in such a powerful, human way like that really made a light bulb go on for me.”

In 1953 Morrow enrolled in New York University’s Communication Arts program. While attending the school he also founded, almost singlehandedly, its first radio station, a campus-only setup that later became indie-music powerhouse WNYU. There, he delivered the news and played classical music, but outside of his duties he was being overtaken by a more savage sound.

“I listened to Martin Block’s [big-band-oriented] ‘Make Believe Ballroom’ on WNEW,” says Morrow. “Every once in a while he’d play a rhythm and blues record, Big Joe Turner or somebody like that. This wild, ‘naughty’ music. My friends and I would just go, ‘Wow, what is this stuff?!’ And then in 1954, Alan Freed, who’d gotten a huge audience by playing this so-called ‘race music’ on WJW in Cleveland, came to New York to go on WINS. People say he came up with the name ‘rock “n” roll,’ but that’s not really true: He just popularized it as a new name for R&B.”