Before WDGY went to real rock ‘n’ roll, it still had some covers and pretenders to play:

• What is “A Teen Age Prayer” by Robbin Hood (and then Kitty White)?
• “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr – ’nuff said.
• “Dungaree Doll” by Eddie Fisher is actually pretty good.
• “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford was popular with everyone.
• “Band of Gold” by Don Cherry crossed over, as did
• “No, Not Much” by the Four Lads.
• “The Great Pretender” shows up by Jackie Riggs instead of the innocuous Platters – c’mon!
• Oh, and in February we first see Pat Boone, doing the El Dorados’ “At My Front Door.”
• And one of my all-time favorites, “Lipstick, Candy and Rubbersole Shoes” by Julius LaRosa.  Fabulous.

And that’s what they played on WDGY on February 5, 1956.

Then on February 6, 1956, WDGY became Minnesota’s first Top 40 radio station when it was purchased by Todd Storz. Former KSTP utility man Herb Oscar Anderson hit the ground running and WDGY caught on fast, going from a station with not much identity and a 4 share to a rock ‘n’ roll monster with a 20 share, second only to monolith WCCO.  For much more on the advent of rock ‘n’ roll radio in the Twin Cities, see the WDGY section in Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio Stations.

Caveat:  Although WDGY became synonymous with the term rock ‘n’ roll, ‘DGY DJ Jim Ramsburg reports that “Storz had a hard and fast rule that we were not to use the term rock and roll – ever.”  The station eased into it, playing Elvis Presley, naturally, but also many songs that mom and pop might like to hear.  It also played a lot of Pat Boone-like covers of real Rhythm & Blues songs, at least at first.

The genesis of Top 40 is full of apocrypha.  Many stations had already had “Top 10” shows –  An item from February 23, 1956, comments on the “Top 10 fad.”  One account of how the number 40 came to be was that when Storz bought his station in New Orleans in 1953, a competing station had a Top 20 show where the counted down the records for an hour every evening, so Todd Storz figured if 20 was good, 40 was better.  Ramsburg says that the number 40 was chosen because that’s how many songs (with commercials) that could be played in three hours.  Ramsburg remembers that the Number 1 song had to be played every hour, but the rest were up to the DJs.  He remembers being particularly sick of “The Wayward Wind.”  Here in the Twin Cities, although the concept was not entirely new, it was new as a concept for an entire station’s programming.

An article from March 20 in Variety gives the down side:

As far as most of the stations is concerned, here’s the rub:  They’re confining themselves almost entirely, if not entirely, to disk jockey shows and the same leading pop tune recordings are played innumerable times during the course of 24 or fewer hours, let alone a week.

There just aren’t enough new top pop recordings hitting the market, of course, to permit sufficient musical variety.  and station operators are keeping their fingers crossed and hoping that their dialers won’t be driven insane listening to the same tunes almost interminably.  They concede that “listeners probably are paying a high price for the possibility of getting money for nothing by having their lobar extremities assailed by the same song over and over.”