Radios just weren’t a big feature in my house. The car was a different matter. Dad listened to some pop/rock in the very early 80s, probably the last Top 40 tunes he ever listened to, but most of the time the radio was tuned to an oldies station that played music from the 50s and 60s.

That explains why my earliest musical memory was “Always Something There to Remind Me,” by Naked Eyes, followed by quite a lot of Beatles music. Elvis and The Beach Boys followed. I listen to very little of the latter now, but I still love The Beatles.

— Matt Milner

Some of my earliest memories involve two songs.

As my mother would work in the kitchen in our house on Second Avenue in Vinton, she would always listen to a country music radio station.

I must have been 4 or 5, but I can still recall distinctly as she would hum or even sing along to “Rose Garden” by Lynn Anderson: “So smile for a while and let’s be jolly. Love shouldn’t be so melancholy. Come along and share the good times while we can.

“I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, there’s gotta be a little rain sometimes.”

The other was a tune that would always seem to play while we in traveled in our 1972 brown Ford LTD sedan.

As my mother would adjust the AM radio dial, the familiar strains of Lobo’s “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” would emit from the speakers.

I would always ask Mom to turn the radio up: “Me and you and a dog named Boo. Travelin’ and livin’ off the land. Me and you and a dog named Boo. How I love being a free man.”

— Jeff Hutton

Before I was pleasantly corrupted by rock music, the first songs I recall hearing were probably all the educational songs that were on “Sesame Street,” which was just getting big when I was a really little kid. (“One of these guys is doin’ his own thing, one of these guys just doesn’t belong ...”)

The first time I remember hearing a song on the radio it was “The Candyman Can” by Sammy Davis, Jr. (Of course I didn’t know it was Sammy Davis Jr. In my mind, there were a bunch of little people living inside the radio who talked and sometimes sang.)