The Mark Davis Show
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The Mark Davis Show is a radio talk show hosted by Mark Davis syndicated nationally in the United States. The Mark Davis Show is distributed nationally by ABC Radio, a division of The Walt Disney Company.
The Mark Davis Show airs from 9 AM to 11:45 AM (Central time) on the flagship station WBAP 820 AM, and is available nationally from 11 AM to 1 PM Central.
Davis' national program is also available on the ABC News & Talk channel on satellite radio: XM 124 and Sirius 143.
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[edit] History
The first "Mark Davis Show" was in morning drive at WOKV (then at 600 AM), Jacksonville FL on October 25, 1982.
His first day on the air in professional radio was Monday, June 18, 1979.
According to Mr. Davis, the "news bug" bit as a result of covering the 1978 Maryland gubernatorial primary. As a fairly new arrival at WMUC, the college radio station at the University of Maryland, he was dispatched to Baltimore to cover a second-tier candidate for the station's election night coverage. That candidate, Harry Hughes, won the Democrat primary (which in Maryland assured him of the general election win). Suddenly Davis found himself at the vortex of one of the region's most riveting political surprises. "The adrenaline rush of being a witness to history fused me onto a path to be a radio news anchor and reporter," he would say later. That path lasted about three years until the talk show bug bit.
A talk show fell into Mr. Davis's lap as a result of a programming change made at WOKV/Jacksonville soon after his ascent to News Director in 1982. Station management wanted to switch a poorly-rated AM Top 40 station to the talk format as cost-effectively as possible which added up to firing all the DJs, but keeping his news department and looking for a local morning host to kick off a full day of syndicated shows via satellite from the fledgling ABC Talk Radio Network, featuring personalities like Owen Spann of KGO/San Francisco and Michael Jackson of KABC/Los Angeles. The station looked no further than Davis, who agreed to continue managing the news department in addition to hosting a daily 6-10 am talk show. "I was 24, and the show was probably not very good," he admits. "Then I guess it got good."
Part of working in Jacksonville involved hosting shows from the TPC golf tournament in nearby Ponte Vedra, where golf-hungry executives from RKO Radio heard him in 1985 and lured him to their Memphis station, WHBQ. His April 1985 debut there signaled the beginning of an exclusively talk-show-guided life, no longer connected to traditional news reporting and its requirements of objectivity. "You have to remember," he would later recall, "my first two and a half years on radio, I shared very few of my personal political views, since I ran the news department. You can't exactly say the mayor is a bum and then go cover his news conference."
After Memphis, Davis accepted his first position in a Top 20 market, heading to WTKN, the Susquehanna talk station in Tampa-St. Petersburg FL. Twelve weeks later, the entire staff was fired as the station switched to a business news format. A career pothole turned into the opportunity of a lifetime, as this left Davis available to return to his hometown of Washington DC to accept a mid-morning show at WWRC-AM, the station he had listened to in high school and college, where shows hosted by Pat Buchanan (among others) gave him a taste for issue discussions on radio. It was during his tenure at WWRC that Davis found himself repeatedly pranked on the air by a duo known as SCREAMCO. These pranks, which caused Davis a certain degree of humiliation, were covered by the local Washington DC City Paper. Davis was hired in 1990 in Washington by Tyler Cox, who left in 1992 to become Operations Manager at WBAP in Dallas-Ft. Worth, where they were reunited in 1994. Cox left WBAP in 1998 to program crosstown rival KRLD. He then accepted a management position at the Salem Radio Network before returning to program WBAP in 2006.
[edit] Music
"Little things mean a lot" is a Mark Davis key to success, and one of those characteristics noticed frequently by listeners is the eclectic and carefully chosen "bumper music," which are fifteen- to thirty-second snippets of songs played as the show resumes after commercial breaks. Most shows use familiar hits shared universally around the country. The Davis library makes use of many recognizable songs but relies most heavily on Mark's vast collection of Cd's and downloads embracing primarily rock album cuts from the 1960s through the '80s but supplemented by jazz, R&B and funk.
The theme that opens each hour of the show (locally and nationally) is a piece written by Barry Young of TM Century, a production music house in Dallas. Barry plays every instrument.
Fridays are kicked off with the James Brown "I Feel Good" montage, the James Brown classic infused with various drops of Brown repeating the line ("You want me to say I feel good? I feel good.")
