naiveart:

my mum told me last night about how as a teenager growing up in a very rural small farming town there were only two radio stations, and both only played folk and country songs. the only music you could hear without driving hours to the city. except for the farm boys who did the night shifts while their fathers slept, they had big loud radios they took with them while they worked: fathers using them at day to the tune of acoustic guitar, but the sons at night, because of the change in atmospheric pressure, could pick up refracted radio signals from the city, and then tell the girls about it later on. the connoisseurs of taste of the small town, the ones who had access to the secret new sound of the night. always experienced alone and in the big emptiness of the darkened fields .

In the early, hobbyist crystal-set days of radio, many cities observed one day a week of broadcast silence so that radio owners could try to tune in to faraway transmissions, maybe bounced off the ionosphere