Country Radio Days - Rock & Roll Nights

The Voice of Country Music in Paris, Tennessee?

  I would say it was more of an ambition than a lifelong dream but I always wanted to be a radio DJ.

  In the days before the Sony Walkman and Apple IPOD, teenagers in the 70’s spent most of their time either spinning records at home or listening to the radio. The DJ determined what music you listened to and ultimately what records you were buying.

  It was that ambition that led me to “study” radio and television in college. The classical format of the radio station at Murray State University wasn’t exactly what I imagined. It was harder learning how to pronounce the composers than pushing the buttons but it was a start. The payoff came after 10 pm when WKMS was turned over to late night rock and roll. Only the upperclassmen who had served their time with Mussorgsky during the day could spin Emerson, Lake and Palmer at night.

  I finally got my first late night shift in 1977 and did my best imitation of DJs I had heard on WNEW FM in New York in high school. No recordings of those historic radio shows exist and that is probably a good thing.

  That same year I answered an ad for a DJ position at WTPR AM-FM in Paris, Tennessee. It was a weekend job that included spinning country music on the FM station on Friday nights, playing top-forty music on Saturday afternoons and airing church services on Sunday mornings.

  My vast exposure to country music was a 45 rpm recording of The Battle of New Orleans that my brother owned. So here I was 90 miles from Nashville trying to pass myself off as a country DJ each Friday night. It didn’t help that some of the lamest country music of the past 50 years made the charts in the late 70’s. First there was Heaven’s Just a Sin Away which was pushed out of the number one slot by Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue which was then buried by the classic Convoy. I think you see my point. “Breaker, breaker…we got ourselves a long hair Jersey boy in the control room!”

  Saturday mornings I got to spin 70’s top-forty music on the AM station which was only a little better than the country experience. The station’s program director created a formula that required a top 5 song to be played every ten minutes or so. That meant you could hear Barry Manilow’s Copacabana about 5 times too many in one shift. A frustrated colleague at the station extinguished a cigarette on the Manilow record one day but a new copy appeared the next morning. It was a losing battle.

  Anyone who has ever worked at a small town radio station has stories. My favorite was the night I put on a long playing record and ran down the street for some barbeque. I returned to find the station locked. The album eventually ended and so did my pride when I called the station manager from a pay phone to come back and let me in.

  Then there was the night the control board started smoking and the time I literally fell out of my chair while on the air. Another gem was the morning I played Beatles music over the First Baptist Church of Paris services. It was an honest mistake but it was not my finest radio moment.

 Despite the bad music, working as a DJ was still a blast and that short stretch as the voice of country music in Paris, Tennessee led to many more years of radio highs and lows. Tune in to The Flipside next week for radio daze, part two