Rock & Roll's Greatest Hits
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Rock & Roll’s Greatest Hits is a weekly live Saturday night call in oldies request show which is hosted by Dick Bartley. This show originally began in 1982 under the name Solid Gold Saturday Night. In 1991, when Bartley joined ABC Radio (which still carries the show today), the name changed to Rock & Roll's Greatest Hits.
[edit] Show Information
The show airs live Saturday nights, from 7 PM to midnight US Eastern Time. Listeners can phone in requests via a phone number given on the show. Every hour, Dick has a contest where he plays a short piece of a song and whoever is the specified number caller with the correct title and artist wins a prize.
Unlike his other show, American Gold, Rock & Roll's Greatest Hits does not rank its songs by any standards. However, like Gold, Hits has a different theme every week, usually focusing on a particular band. (Bartley seems to take more liberty in the selection of the themes on Hits, as more general themes like "The Psychedelic '60s" and "Rockin' Instrumentals" are frequently used in Hits whereas they are rare in Gold.) On the first Saturday of each month, Bartley hosts a "Class Reunion" from Walt Disney World, featuring the music of a particular year. (The feature is similar to Gold's Yearbook Special.)
Bartley's used to focus on the oldies genre and the artists that came out of the late 1950s and 1960s with artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holley, The Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, The Beach Boys, Del Shannon, The Four Seasons, and the Beatles.
Today, the show plays only music from the late '60s and has featured more '70s songs. Bartley on his broadcast used to define the Top 40 rock and roll era as songs from "Rock Around The Clock" (1955, Bill Haley & His Comets) to "Crocodile Rock" (1973, Elton John)." This phenomenon is not unique to Bartley's program; in fact, the oldies genre as a whole has been increasingly skewing toward later years and well into the 1970s, thus placing a much lower emphasis on 1950's hits.
