On July 15, 1929, an announcer for radio station KSL in Salt Lake City climbed a ladder to reach the studio's single working microphone, suspended from the ceiling, and stayed perched there for the full half hour of the first broadcast of what would become Music and the Spoken Word. The program paired the Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square with a short spoken message, a format so simple it has barely changed in the nearly one hundred years since.
What has made the broadcast historically significant is not its content alone but its sheer continuity. It has aired every week since that first Sunday in 1929, through the Depression, the Second World War and every subsequent decade, without a single week's interruption, a run its own broadcaster describes as the world's longest running national radio program carried continuously on a network. Richard L. Evans, a KSL staff announcer, hosted the program from June 1930 until his death in October 1971, forty one years at the microphone that made him the broadcast's longest serving voice.
The program added a television simulcast in October 1949, more than two decades before most American households owned a color set, and that television broadcast is today recognized as the longest running non news program in American television history in its own right. Carried now to more than twenty countries and produced under The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Music and the Spoken Word remains, nearly a century after a KSL announcer balanced on a ladder to reach the only microphone in the room, exactly what it started as: choral music and a short message, broadcast without fail.