Border Radio

Border Radio

Border radio was broadcast by mega-watt "border blaster" stations set up just across the Mexican border to evade U.S. regulations, which beamed programming across the United States and as far away as South America, Japan, and Western Europe. These are also sometimes referred to as "X Stations" for their call letters. Border radio was made popular in 1930s by "goat-gland doctor" J. R. Brinkley who included Country Music on the air and featured groups like the Carter Family and Cowboy Slim Rinehart, known as the "King of Border Radio.”


J. R. Brinkley, the Goat gland doctor, sponsored the Carter Family

Cowboy Slim Rinehart made a career singing hillbilly songs and playing guitar on border radio programs. Big Bill Lister, rhythm guitarist and opening act for Hank Williams, fondly remembered listening to Rinehart in 1935 on Brady radio station KNEL, which also featured Bobby Kendrick's (a.k.a. Bob Skyles) family medicine-show band and the Skyrockets. In 1936 Rinehart and the Skyrockets preformed on KIUM, Pecos. Soon afterward, Rinehart moved to the station that helped him become famous, XEPN near Eagle Pass. In 1937 XEPN of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, was one of the numerous border radio stations, unregulated by the United States government, that transmitted their programs into the U.S. Since these stations operated in Mexico, they could use very strong signals that reached as far north as Canada. This arrangement gave Rinehart an audience much larger than that of a conventional American radio station.