Scott Muni (May 10, 1930 – September 28, 2004) was an American disc jockey, who worked at the heyday of the AM Top 40 format and then was a pioneer of FM progressive rock radio.
[4] The following July, he was promoted to host Request Review, an evening music program famously helmed by Alan Freed a decade earlier.
[8] Prior to leaving the station, the Akron Junior Chamber of Commerce honored Muni for one sock hop that also fundraised for a local children's home.
While at WMCA, Muni was briefly the subject of unwanted attention in both New York and Akron when a congressional investigation into the practice of payola called him in for questioning.
[11] He moved to WABC (770 AM) in late 1960 as that station fully converted into a Top 40 format of its own; Muni was billed as part of the "Swingin' Seven at 77" airstaff that also included fellow former WAKR colleague Charlie Greer.
[12] There he did an early evening show called "Scotland's Yard" and was among the first WABC DJs to capture the attention of the teenage audience for which the station would become famous.
Muni had explored some opportunities beyond radio: for a short time he co-hosted a local weekly television show on WABC-TV (channel 7) with Bruce "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, and he would go on to record the spoken single "Letter to an Unborn Child", about a soldier with a premonition, which was released in 1967 to little acclaim.
Muni decided to return to radio, and in 1966, he joined WOR-FM (98.7), one of the earliest stations in the country to program free-form progressive rock music.
[3] While he sometimes spoke in roundabout phrases and succumbed to progressive rock radio clichés such as "That was a tasty cut from ...", he also conveyed on the air and in his professional relationships a gruff immediacy that was a by-product of both his time in the Marines and his earlier Top 40 skills.
[15]) Muni specialized in playing records from up-and-coming, or sometimes just-plain-obscure, acts from the United Kingdom on his weekly Friday "Things from England" segment.