The Radio Planet · the star wing
Follow a Star
Eleven radio lives, in the order they happened — the series they carried, the feuds they ran, the anthologies they guested in.
This is not a search result. Each journey is a written throughline with chapters, and every chapter points at recordings the archive actually holds: a whole surviving run, or the transfers whose own titles name the performer. Where the surviving metadata cannot confirm a credit, the page says so instead of guessing.
11
Lives on the shelf
3,900
Recordings gathered
1924–1969
Span
Choose a life
Pick a voice and travel with it
1932–1955
Jack Benny
The man who owned the pause
Benny's whole art was subtraction: he gave the jokes to his cast and kept the silence for himself.
310 recordings · 4 chapters
1937–1952
Orson Welles
Radio's first auteur
Welles is the rare case where the radio work came first and the films followed.
292 recordings · 5 chapters
1948–1951
Lucille Ball
The sitcom, three years early
The received story is that Lucille Ball was invented by television.
413 recordings · 3 chapters
1937–1954
Agnes Moorehead
The finest actress radio had
Moorehead was a founder member of the Mercury company and then the most reliable dramatic voice in American radio — and the medium repaid her by almost never announcing her name.
147 recordings · 4 chapters
1943–1954
Vincent Price
The gentleman thief before the horror
A decade before the films that fixed him as a horror actor, Price was radio's Simon Templar: light, amused and faintly dangerous.
107 recordings · 2 chapters
1932–1949
Fred Allen
The wit the network kept cutting
Allen wrote his own material, hated the sponsors, and built Allen's Alley out of ordinary people talking nonsense with total conviction.
437 recordings · 3 chapters
1928–1962
Bing Crosby
The first man to sing to the microphone
Crosby worked out before anyone else that a microphone rewards intimacy rather than volume, and every popular singer since has been arguing with his answer.
1,061 recordings · 4 chapters
1937–1966
Edgar Bergen
A ventriloquist on the radio
The most absurd success in broadcasting: a ventriloquist act on a medium where nobody can see the dummy — and the country's number one programme for years.
643 recordings · 3 chapters
1943–1959
Groucho Marx
The insult as a house style
Groucho was a stage and screen comic long before radio found the right shape for him, and the shape turned out to be a quiz show he refused to take seriously.
246 recordings · 4 chapters
1935–1962
Judy Garland
The voice that never needed a film
Garland has no long-running radio programme of her own, which is exactly why her radio life is worth following: it is scattered across other people's shows for twenty-seven years.
63 recordings · 7 chapters
1924–1969
Guy Lombardo
The band that owned midnight
For nearly fifty years, the last thing America heard in one year and the first thing it heard in the next was Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians playing 'Auld Lang Syne'.
181 recordings · 4 chapters