Jim Lowe, who played standards for more than 50 years as a disc jockey, most notably at WNEW-AM in New York, and in 1956 had a No. 1 record of his own, “The Green Door,” died on Monday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 93.
His death was confirmed by his cousin Jane Brite.
Mr. Lowe brought the American songbook to generations of listeners on radio stations including WCBS, WNBC and, for more than two decades, WNEW. Nicknamed Mr. Broadway for his encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century American music and musical-theater trivia, he was heard on the NBC radio program “Monitor” and hosted “Jim Lowe’s New York” on WNEW for many years.
He was also a recording artist, mostly on Dot Records in the 1950s and ’60s. His records included “Gambler’s Guitar” (1953), a rockabilly song that he wrote, and a country version of Marvin Moore and George Campbell’s “Four Walls” (1957).
Mr. Lowe’s biggest hit was “The Green Door,” a catchy song about a secretive establishment, with words by Mr. Moore and music by Bob Davie. The record, on which Mr. Lowe’s chipper vocals were accompanied by a tinkling honky-tonk piano, reached No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart in 1956.
Even though his own records were closer to Elvis than Ella, Mr. Lowe remained devoted to the American songbook long after many radio stations abandoned it for other formats.
“Unfortunately, the largest, most important city in the country doesn’t have a station with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Nat Cole and Sarah Vaughan,” he said in an interview with a Florida radio station in 2004, more than a decade after WNEW-AM was sold to Bloomberg and became a business-news station.
Mr. Lowe did his best to remedy the absence with his last radio show, “Jim Lowe and Friends,” recorded weekly at various New York jazz spaces and syndicated nationally. The show ended its run in 2004.
“The show was a labor of love,” he told The Daily News that year. “When it became a labor, it was time to end it.”
James Elsworth Lowe was born in Springfield, Mo., on May 7, 1923, to Dr. Horace Arch Lowe, a surgeon, and the former Pearl Lines. He interrupted his studies at the University of Missouri to serve in the Army during World War II.
He dabbled in radio at the university before graduating in 1948, then worked at stations in Springfield, Indianapolis and Chicago before moving to WCBS in New York in the mid-1950s.
He started at WNEW in 1962, hosting the venerable overnight show “Milkman’s Matinee” before “Jim Lowe’s New York” made its debut. He left the station in 1969, but returned a few years later and continued to work there until 1987.
No immediate family members survive.
In 2004, while he was still recording “Jim Lowe and Friends,” Mr. Lowe told The Daily News that the best hope for keeping standards relevant was to make sure contemporary artists record them.
“We aren’t abandoning Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, but we also want to support newer artists and new recordings,” he said. “Crystal Gayle and Cyndi Lauper have done very nice recordings of classic songs. That’s how this music will be carried forward.”
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