Born in Malvern, Arkansas, Raymond lived with his grandparents as a small child, but later moved to his parents' home in North Little Rock where he finished high school. He began working in radio and was on the air when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Drafted into the U.S. Army in October of 1942, he was sent into the Signal Corps and soon reported to the Sixty-Fifth Signal Battalion in Brownwood, Texas, where he earned his military occupational specialty as a teletype operator. He was sent to England, and then onto the continent about a month after D-Day. "We were feeding information and communications to Patton," he says of his duties. He ended the war in Berlin working for AFM Radio, and was discharged in 1946 as a private first class. He worked for KLRA in Little Rock, and then in West Memphis before coming to KWKH in Shreveport. He "played a small part in the careers" of Hank Williams, George Jones, Johnny Horton, Jimmie Davis, and Nat Stuckey. He also wrote a book on Elvis Presley whom, he says, he "introduced for the first time to a world-wide audience."