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As Shakespeare
wrote in Romeo and Juliet, "A rose by any other name would smell
as sweet."
I use that concept
here to reference a jingle company that beginning in 1959 was
known as Pepper Sound Studios, then Pepper-Tanner, still later
as The William B. Tanner Company, and for a few years after
1984, Media General. Its jingles ran the gamut from silly to
spectacular, depending on the era, the composers and whether the
jingles were recorded in Memphis or Dallas. (Some of its best
products were produced in Dallas from the mid-60s to the
mid-70s.)
Referred to here
as just "Pepper" for convenience, the company sold, or more
properly "traded out," more jingles than all the Dallas
companies combined. A trade-out would work like this. A radio
station in a small or medium market would agree to air hundreds
of commercials for D-Con or one of Pepper’s other advertising
clients over the course of a year, in exchange for which the
station would receive a customized jingle package. Some of
Pepper’s production libraries were also distributed in this
manner.
While the company
produced several hundred packages (and a dozen libraries) over
its years in existence, only a handful were memorable. We
present here a few of Pepper’s best, or at least most unusual,
jingle packages in demo form. What Pepper lacked in quality it
certainly made up for in quantity, and in the 1960s and early
70s its small purple tape boxes were ubiquitous.
Find
more about Pepper, Pepper-Tanner, William B. Tanner
and Media General
here. |
