Saturday morning (02 February 2008), I was watching my recordings of The Late Show with David Letterman for the past week. During the commercial break before the start of Friday’s show, Steve Baskerville did a Black History Month segment featuring Soul Brother No. 1, James Brown. I sat up from my reclined position because over the past seven years, Terry and I spent a lot of time from late January through late February, writing and recording our version of Black History Month Segments. Our segment was titled The Black Pages of American History, and was created in 2001, to air as a Black History Month Segment for The Steve Dahl Show.

I thought about the way every year Terry and I swore “next year we’re not going to wait until the last minute to start writing.” But I really got lost in the memories of how much fun we had recording them. I wish I had the audio of the recording session out takes. As you might imagine, they were peppered with language guaranteed to lose the stations’ FCC License. I also wish I had saved the hard copies of the scripts we used during the recording sessions. Again as you might imagine, we didn’t always stick to the script, hand-writing improvements in the margins. For those who have asked the name of the song we used as a music bed for the segment, the song is “Baby, I Love You” by the group Cold Blood. I have to give a huge thanks to Joe Kraslen, Pete Zimmerman, Mike Pentz, and Chris Cwiak, who each engineered and produced at least a months worth of segment over its’ seven year life span. This year, Terry and I had planned to add photographs, re-work the script, and re-frame the featured song, so the segment could be used on the WGN Morning News (thanks to Jeff Hoover).

Here’s the script from our 2005 James Brown segment, the second of three James Brown Black Pages segments.

Holler :-0
Stan Lawrence