Georgia Erwin, who is regularly heard as a soloist over KMOX, is one of the real pioneers in the artistic side of radio.
Her very first radio appearance was when station WSBF was still in its infancy and since that time she has sung over KSD, WIL and KMOX. She has been on the station regularly since last summer when she appeared with Ted Straeter with whom she studies. She was a member of the Three Best Girls trio and since the first of the year has been featured in the Don and Georgia sweetheart duo and as a soloist.
Georgia’s real career began much longer ago than that. When she was quite a tiny youngster, her father had great aspirations for her singing ability and essayed to have her learn to sing with him. He laboriously repeated the lyrics of the songs and she would obediently say or sing them after him. Try as he would, she could not get sufficient courage to sing with him. But she was quite docile and enthusiastic so long as he sang them first.
One day he was seized with an inspiration and brought home a cylindrical recording of “Willie, Willie, Why Are You So Bashful” (or something like that) and played it on the “gramophone.” Little Georgia was simply intrigued and delighted with the tune and lay fascinatedly on the floor while that record played over and over. It so pleased her that she forgot herself and started singing the catchy lines with the record. Her father was enthralled – he’d achieved success!
From then on she sang lustily at the top of her voice all of the time and was featured in school entertainments, school what-nots and the like that were held in Granite City. She won contests in high school for the best voice, learned to play the piano and generally delighted her music-loving father.
When radio became a field for vocal endeavor, she was among the first to offer her services and has become correlatively successful and interested in its possibilities as radio has grown.
Her radio success, however, is attributed to her training with Ted Straeter of the Hasgall-Straeter studios who taught her the essential elements of radio technique.
Like most radio artists, her greatest ambition is to be a chain artist someday and she says in a happy-go-lucky semi-serious manner that she feels convinced that if she works hard enough and lives long enough she will some day attain her aim.
Georgia is blond and blue-eyed, pretty and vivacious and with the most irrepressible collection of humor possible in one person. She is optimistic about everything, completely enraptured with radio work and singing, to the exclusion of all else. Listen to her on KMOX.
(Originally published in Radio and Entertainment 4/1/33).