The Charlotte Observer, 1965
Bivens Picks All His Music
As Though He Were A Guest
By DICK BANKS
Observer Staff Writer
Bill Bivens out at WBT speaks to his FM stereo audience with the modulated warmth of a tactful old friend during five hours at the record turntables five nights a week.
He ought to have a smooth style. Bivens has been working in radio and television since he was 14 years old. At 50 he's still dark-haired, a stocky sensitive man with a wrestler's bull neck.
Stereo Serenade, he calls his show. Picks his own music, and presents it, he says, as if "you're a guest in somebody's home. You're playing for them."
Sonny Rollins, Earl Hines, Johnny Hodges, Garland and Minelli, Goulet, Streisand, Darin, Al Martino — Bivens puts music on the air waves that has life but no hint of epilepsy.
"I always work in a conversational style. I talk as if in somebody's living room. I never think I'm talking to a group of people.
"I want people out on their patios to dance and have a good time, with restful, relaxing music. About 10 p.m. I'll put on some bands and jump it up a little. Then I'll slow it down again about 11."
A native of Wadesboro, Bivens moved to Gastonia when he was about five. In 1933 he left Greenville, S. C., to work four years as a presidential announcer in Washington, in the days of Roosevelt's fireside chats and Huey Long's one-man filibusters.
In Washington he worked as permanent stand-in on the Arthur Godfrey Show. CBS, which then owned WBT, stationed Bivens in Charlotte as a staff announcer for four years.
His experience as an announcer included nine years with the Fred Waring Show, four with Kate Smith, and one each with Harry James, Jimmy Melton, and the Dorseys.
"I enjoyed most working with the Waring organization. I wrote material. Fred and I would play parts together. I enjoyed traveling all over the United States with him.
"Waring's shows for General Electric used to cost $100,000 a night. Fred is a perfectionist, and those shows were put on live.
"Talk about tenseness. You can look as free and easy as a frog on a log in a show like that, but the tension's there."
Bivens turns mysterious red and green knobs on his radio control panel. He makes notations on his FCC logsheet, answers the telephone, and keeps two jumps ahead of his turntables in selecting albums he has decided to play.
"Arthur Godfrey taught me how to select music. And having been with so many music shows — something's got to rub off."
The Bivenses live in South Mecklenburg off Sardis Road. Son Brad, 20, a dedicated guitarist, is going this fall to the North Carolina School of the Arts. Daughter Jane, 15, goes to East Mecklenburg High School.
Jane won't let her father Jeopardize the lives of the quail that cross their home acre, but her dad does like to slip off on an occasional deer hunt.
Bivens can reminisce until the cows come home.
For instance during his days in New York City:
"We put Elvis Presley on for his first night of television. It was so typical of the old Sinatra buildup.
"A busload of kids from some little New York town, about a hundred of them, heard Presley at the dress rehearsal that afternoon. They went wild over this boy.
"Col. Tom Parker (Presley's manager) took the kids to dinner. That night he put 25 here and there and there around the theater. And he told them, 'When my boy comes on there, let him know about it.'
"There was nothing but bedlam for a whole half hour. Presley was on his way."
