MUSCLE SHOALS – This article is the first in a series that we are publishing about Radio Broadcasting in Northwest Alabama, and will feature the Radio Stations of Singing River Media Group, L.L.C. While the name “Singing River Media Group, L.L.C.”, may not sound entirely familiar to Shoals residents, certainly the callsigns WLAY and WVNA are familiar, as these stations have been around seemingly forever. But, today they are so much more than just a couple of AM stations of days-gone-by.
As in all things, technology and social change have evolved into networks of radio stations which are clustered into media companies that serve multiple sets of demographic groups. For example, Singing River Media Group currently operates four radio stations, and has licenses for four more stations. Whereas, “back in the day” listeners would be greeted by radio station call signs when they turned their sets on, Broadcast Radio has undergone a huge shift in identity branding. WLAY, 100.1 FM, is known to most listeners as, “Shoals Country”. WVNA, 105.5 FM is now, “The Big Dog” and plays rock music. WMSR, “The Bull” 94.9 FM is country. Wrapping up the roster is “MY 101.5 FM”, which features adult contemporary programming.
Photo courtesy of “My Plan C” blog. https://myplanc.blog/
On a personal note, this writer holds a special place for WLAY and WVNA. Way back when… On my bicycle paper route, delivering the “Tri-Cities Daily” around Sheffield, I would spend my time listening to WLAY-AM 1450. With my 6-transistor radio strapped to the bike seat, I would sling the papers while listening to tunes emanating across the airwaves. I heard my first Beatles song; discovered “Six Days On The Road” by Dave Dudley; Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman”; Ray Charles; Jerry Reed. There are just too many to list. And I got them brought to me through WLAY.
So, we went over to the radio stations which are back at their historic home on Second Street in Muscle Shoals to “talk shop” with Operations Manager, Kevin Self. We wanted to learn more about the history of WLAY, the oldest radio station in Northwest Alabama, and one of the five original stations licensed to operate in the State before World War II.
Kevin Self – Singing river Media Group, L.L.C.
“Well, we’re historic in the context that where we are physically is where these stations had their beginnings on the same exact place piece of real estate in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Kevin explained, “And they go back all the way to 1933. The first call letters were WMSD, which stood for “Muscle Shoals District”. So that’s how the station went on the air in 1933. Actually, it was late, very, very late 1933 or very early 34 is kind of ambiguous there. It was either like December 31st, or January 1st of 1934. So no one really can pinpoint that date. So we’ll just say the end of 1933 or January 1st, 1934.”
WLAY is officially celebrating their 90th Anniversary this year. To stay in perspective, Muscle Shoals is celebrating their 100th Birthday this year also.
Kevin continued, “Muscle Shoals City was nothing more than a dirt road at that time. And so here we are in the middle of that history and still going strong today. The call letters changed a couple of times since 1933. They there was the National Recovery Act that was implemented in the forties during the Great Depression. So the call letters were changed to WNRA, kind of in honor of that, you know, for a short period of time. Then there was another station call, and then ‘WLAY’. And that’s where it remains to this day.” Kevin continued, “Back then, in those very early days when somebody was applying for a license, station operators could pretty much get whatever power output they asked for. The station could have gotten a Clear Channel license if it wanted one. But here in Northwest Alabama, there simply wasn’t enough population to support something of that size and expense. And we didn’t really need that much power, 50,000 watts, to get the coverage. You see, when the AM band was not very cluttered at all, even at 250 watts, which is what the station was putting out, the signal got out a long way. It got out to all over northwest Alabama. People as far away as Haleyville and Hackelberg and over to Decatur and South Tennessee made for a huge listening audience. WLAY didn’t get to 1000 watts daytime and 500 watts nighttime until many years later.”
We conducted the interview in the very same space as the original WLAY control room. Today, the control rooms in radio stations primarily operate differently than in the early days. Nowadays, there are computers that run most of the content for broadcast. But back in the ‘30’s, ‘40’s and ‘50’s there was a great deal of live content. Next to the control room there at WLAY is a large glass window which looked out on what was once a large studio.
Kevin elaborated on the original setup, “Yeah, it was a whole lot of live radio. This particular studio that we’re sitting in, you see the glass window. Well, on the other side of that window was where the studio was. There was a piano in there. There were several microphones in there. So these rooms looked at each other. And that’s how radio worked at that time. I’ll give you an example of the live part of radio in 1930 to the mid 1960’s, something like that. Sonny James from Hackelberg, one of the biggest country music stars in all the sixties and seventies, he actually had a live radio show in there. First he came in 1959 when he was just a little boy, about five years old. He and his family came to Muscle Shoals to audition for a Saturday afternoon radio slot. Well, naturally Sonny and his family got the show. It was a two hour radio program. They would come up here from Hackelberg every Saturday afternoon for their two hour radio show and it was live and it was a heck of a production.
We did a lot of shows like that. You would have an operator sitting in the control room adjusting the microphones or turning up the microphone on the piano, mixing it, whatever. And it was live! And, even earlier than Sonny James, there were many, many live programs at that time, simply because in those very early years, recording devices had not kept up. They weren’t portable. You couldn’t record something and send it out on a on a tape or or on a a record or an album. So if you were going to have a two hour long show, you came in, set up your instruments, or whatever, and you had the station for two hours!”
And after that, of course, technology started advancing very quickly, by the forties, the late forties and the fifties, a lot of that live stuff had been phased out and 78 RPM records were kind of the fare at that point. And then that made room for the 45, which lasted all the way up until, the late seventies. And then all of a sudden albums. And then everything got digitized. And everything evolved.
You could record your show on tape or you could put it on in different types of storage media and that was Broadcasting. But what you have today, everything’s computerized. It’s just a huge advancement in technology from that period of time to today. I’m just lucky enough that when I started in this business, we were still playing 45’s and you still had to physically work. When you came in to do your radio shift, you came in early. You programed all of your commercials, you picked all of the music, you put it on the turntable, started it, finished it, put it back in the racks. And it was continual movement. You were busy the entire time you were here. It wasn’t hard work, but there was a lot of it.”
So things have changed. Changed a lot! But interestingly, at least in this writer’s experience, the people haven’t changed that much. One can tell when listening to Kevin Self, becoming a Broadcaster can be addictive, in a good way. Successful disk jockeys, programmers, sales folks and everybody else who works in Broadcasting in concert with the staff and management at a station finds a peculiar kinship with each other. It gets in your blood.
The Quad Cities Daily will continue with articles on Singing River Media Group. We will get to know the people from every aspect of the company which has been bringing entertainment to folks in our neck of the woods for 90 years. This should be fun!
