He has been one of the best-known Americans in the world for more than 30 years, but most people in this country wouldn`t recognize him-or his name.
Willis Conover likes it that way.
Host of Voice of America`s jazz program ”Music USA” for 32 years, Conover`s soothing, baritone voice is known worldwide, except in the United States, where VOA broadcasts are prohibited.
He says he is ”delighted” with his American anonymity, having had a taste of fame in other countries he has visited.
In 1959, Conover landed at the Warsaw airport to find hundreds of Polish citizens waiting-some bearing flowers and gifts, others playing instruments.
”I wondered who it was for,” he said.
He was stunned to learn they were waiting for him.
Few in this country would give a second glance to the 66-year-old man wearing a slightly wrinkled blue oxford shirt and a pair of baggy gray slacks to his recording studio in a federal office building.
At 8:30 in the morning, he enters his studio. It is too small to accommodate all his stuff, which flows into the corridor that leads to his cramped, 60,000-item record library.
He sits at a carpeted table stacked high with boxed tapes, magazines, newspaper clippings and notepaper. He speaks slowly, thoughtfully about his job as a ”music-program conductor.”
”It sounds very pretentious,” admits Conover, who despises the term
”disc jockey.” ”But it comes closer to what I do.”
Skimming a series of green notecards filled with ”must do” items, Conover takes a minute to spray his mouth with synthetic saliva and to sip club soda-a routine he repeats frequently throughout the day. The removal of a cancerous tumor on his neck early in 1985, coupled with months of radiation therapy, devastated his salivary glands.
Neither operation nor treatment affected his distinguished voice, which was ”discovered” for its radio-announcing qualities when he was 14. Chosen to play a radio announcer in a school skit, he was told by many skitgoers that he sounded like a pro.
”When you`re 14,” said Conover, tapping his foot to an Ella Fitzgerald song, ”something like that sticks in your mind.”
At the end of his first and only year at Salisbury State College in Maryland, a local radio station offered him a part-time job. Within a couple of months, he accepted another, better-paying job in the western part of the state. While in the Army, he worked on weekends at a Washington radio station, where he worked full time after being discharged.
While there, he played records by the artists he had grown to love-Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday and Louis Armstrong-in addition to the radio station`s traditional fare. At the same time, he promoted some of Washington`s premier live jazz concerts.
Late in 1954, after a short stint at another radio station, Conover heard that VOA needed a host for a jazz program. He decided to meet with the program manager, and ”within 30 seconds, we both knew that we both knew jazz.”
Now, through ”Music USA” and other VOA presentations, Conover teaches millions of people about the music with American roots. The New York Times once estimated his jazz audience at 100 million a day.
During his travels to foreign countries, Conover said, many people have told him that his programs have taught them more than jazz-they claim they learned all the English they know from him. To many, he is ”the ambassador of jazz.”
He speaks slowly, so as not to be misunderstood by audience members who know little English. Creating an introduction, body and conclusion with a climax and sub-climaxes, Conover says the preparation, rather than the actual recording, is the difficult part.
”It`s like when you write a sonnet,” says Conover, who enjoys writing poetry and limericks in his spare time. ”You do the last two lines first and then try to find 12 good ones to lead up to that.”
His steady popularity for more than 30 years shows he has the hang of it. ”Jazz will either kill you or keep you young,” said Conover with a boyish smile. ”There`s a spirit, an essence to it-there`s a vitality to it. It`s another language, an expression of human emotions. And when it reaches me, it reaches me.”
