Michael Townsend

TOWNSEND Michael Edgar (Age 63) Passed away suddenly on June 10th, 2009 at his home in Sumter, SC where he resided for the past six years. Mr. Townsend was a native of Spokane, WA. He was the son of the late Vern and Mar garet Townsend. He attended Shadle Park High School and joined the Air Force in 1965 serving in the reserves while living in Boston MA. He returned to Spokane where he became a radio Disk Jockey under air names including Mike Stevens and Mike Taylor. He founded KMSI-FM (Spokane Student Broadcasting, Inc.) to train students in the art of broadcasting and all that it entailed. To say he became quite fond of the hit music he played would be a serious understatement. In about 1971, in an attempt to determine what oldies had charted, he and a friend would camp out at the public libraries and go through the weekly music charts beginning the first week of January 1955 and built a chronological listing of every song to enter the American Top Forty until a manuscript of data had been gleaned. As fate would have it, a fellow by the name of Joel Whitburn got a similar vision and soon he began to compile research books for broadcasters and record collectors in conjunction with Billboard Magazine. Realizing that the Billboard Charts should not be the final word on the subject, Mr. Townsend expanded research criteria to include the other trade magazines such as Cashbox, Variety, Record World, and all English speaking countries like Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, encompassing regional hits as well. This would include all genres of charted music and no longer merely confined to the American Top Forty, or the "Fab Fifty" or even "The Hot 100." He then expanded his audio archive to preserve it all. In later years, he relocated to Sumter where he discovered a new genre which became his favorite one of all: "Beach Music" which is apparently indigenous to the eastern seaboard where "The Shag" still dominates dancing on Ocean Boulevard in the Carolinas. Naturally he included all this beach music to the massive database of music. The day before his death, he remarked that he had amassed more than 70,000 recordings. Taylor, as he preferred to be called, was known as "The Human Jukebox" and fielded questions via phone and internet from music buffs wanting him to identity "who sang" a certain song; amazingly, he would usually know. He possessed an uncanny ability to remember the artists and their hits going back more than a hundred years. He could tell you about the very first recording ever made, which was a stanza of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" read by Thomas Edison himself in 1878 as the first successful test of Edison's talking machine. Taylor's archives included "cylinder" recordings that dated back as far back as 1898 and about 80% of charted music for the entire 20th Century. He is survived by five children: Beverly Boatman, Ami Caline Campbell, Steven Campbell, Dwayne Campbell and Crystal Hanson; two sisters, Jackie Nelson, Shelia Stevens and a brother, Richard Townsend. A memorial service is scheduled for 4:00 pm, July 19th, at the V.F.W. located at Washington & Mission in Spokane. Memorial contributions can be made to the Spokane Food Bank.