WLAC
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| WLAC | |
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| City of license | Nashville, Tennessee |
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| Branding | NewsRadio 1510 WLAC |
| Slogan | Tennessee's News, Traffic, and Weather Station |
| First air date | November 24, 1926 |
| Frequency | 1510 (kHz) |
| Format | News/Talk |
| Power | 50,000 watts |
| Class | A |
| Callsign meaning | Life And Casualty (reference to former owner) |
| Owner | Clear Channel Communications |
| Website | www.wlac.com |
WLAC is a clear channel radio station based in Nashville, Tennessee, operating at 1510 kHz on the AM dial. Its first broadcast took place on November 24, 1926. The call letters were chosen to contain an acronym for the first owner of the station, the Life and Casualty Insurance Company of Tennessee.
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[edit] Early history
The early years of the station featured, as most big-city stations of that time, network programming (WLAC was a CBS affiliate), local news, studio-orchestra musical features (accompanied by an in-studio pipe organ), farm reports, and some educational programming. Its main competitor in that era was WSM, which became known as the radio station where country music essentially developed and became a national phenomenon. When country music became a big business in the late 1940s, WLAC added early-morning and Saturday-afternoon shows in an attempt to steal some of WSM's thunder. Otherwise, the station prided itself as a pillar of the community and placed emphasis on general full-service programs.
[edit] The nighttime R & B years
By the 1950s, however, WLAC would achieve a distinctive notoriety of its own. The station became legendary from a quartet of nighttime rhythm and blues shows hosted by Gene Nobles, "John R." (John Richbourg), Herman Grizzard, and Bill "Hossman" (or simply "Hoss") Allen in the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the station's clear channel designation, the signal reached most of the Eastern and Midwestern United States, although African-American listeners in the Deep South were the intended audience of the programs. Further, several foreign countries, particularly islands in the Caribbean, were within range of the station's nighttime signal; it was said to have played a considerable role in the development of reggae music as a result. WLAC was particularly popular with some young Euro-American teenagers; some believe that the nightly shows laid the foundational audience for the rock and roll phenomenon of the late 1950s.
Nobles began the move, in 1946, toward what were considered at the time "race" records, a euphemism intended to deter supposedly respectable audiences. But he and the others discovered the large numbers of African-Americans in places like the Mississippi Delta, the Carolina Lowcountry, Louisiana, Chicago, and Detroit, people who practically no other radio stations were serving. Gradually phasing in artists like Amos Milburn, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino in the early 1950s to supplement the big-band artists of the era such as Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, the WLAC announcers presided over the development of what became "rhythm-and-blues" music. They did this mainly to attract advertisers who serviced the African-American community, such as hair-care products. The jockeys developed a reputation for colorfully pitching those products on-air; some product slogans lent themselves to sexually suggestive double entendres, which only increased the announcers' popularity among teen listeners. The jockeys conducted the advertising sales on a "per inquiry", or commission, basis, meaning that ratings per se did not play a major role in the programs' successes.
Performers of later years, such as Johnny Winter, credit the station as being a valuable source of inspiration for their artistic development. A strange irony about the phenomenon was unknown to most listeners of that time: all four disc jockeys were in fact middle-aged Caucasians, not African-Americans, as their Southern, gravelly, drawling voices suggested. Richbourg and Allen in particular made frequent use of colloquialisms most familiar to their audience, thereby convincing many that they were "soul brothers," as a common expression of that day would have it.
Other regular sponsors of the four shows included Randy's Record Shop of Gallatin, Tennessee, Ernie's Record Mart, and Buckley's Record Shop, the latter two of Nashville, all of which conducted mail order business selling the recordings featured on the shows, and had affiliations with record companies in Middle Tennessee. Buckley's Record Shop folded in the early 1970s; Randy's Record Shop ceased operating in the late 1990s. Allen and Richbourg also had financial interests in recording companies, artist management, and recording studios at varying points in their careers.
Each jockey's program lasted from one to two hours per evening Mondays through Saturdays, occupying roughly (with adjustments over the years) the period between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. Central Time; on Sunday nights, Richbourg or Allen hosted programs featuring the similar black gospel genre. Richbourg and Allen took credit for helping boost (or start) the careers of artists like James Brown, Ray Charles, B. B. King, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin; Nobles helped the likes of Little Richard.
[edit] The 1970s and the Top 40
Other than the famous late-night shows, WLAC followed a fairly conventional news/features course in the daytime until the early 1970s, when new management attempted to program a standard-issue consulted Top 40 format, competing against ratings leader WMAK (now defunct) for the Nashville-area teenage audience. This move in particular is believed to have prompted Richbourg and Nobles to retire, as they had no interest in conforming to a predetermined, pop-oriented playlist.
In addition to this, most markets in WLAC's night-time coverage area now had African-American-oriented stations of their own, most of which attracted the demographic groups that formerly listened to Allen, Richbourg, and Nobles' shows as their only source for R&B and soul music. Furthermore, musical tastes among younger listeners in particular changed in divergent directions as the 1970s approached, as Euro-American youth began to prefer the hard rock that initially modeled itself on the blues (especially on the upstart FM stations that began playing it), while African-American kids gravitated toward the grittier edges of funk or early disco and, eventually, rap. This made the Motown, Muscle Shoals, and Memphis sounds favored by the DJ trio seem passe, and the hosts' audience, unsurprisingly, began to age, something almost always unattractive to radio station managers.
The retirements, however, alienated many former listeners outside Nashville who no longer heard distinctive programming, and WLAC appeared to gain little Arbitron improvements from the remaining local audience, this despite nonstop promotional events staged throughout the Nashville area. Only Hoss Allen kept his program, which he converted sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s to a black gospel format, by moving it to the overnight slot before morning drive-time; despite complying with management wishes (unlike Richbourg and Nobles), WLAC never promoted Allen's shows actively again.
[edit] News and talk since 1980
The station finally pulled the plug on its unsuccessful run as a Top 40 outlet and changed formats to news and talk in 1980, making it one of the first stations in the Southern U.S. to adopt that format exclusively. It continues to fill that niche of programming, and in the mid-1980s, WLAC pioneered the now-burgeoning format of sports talk in middle Tennessee, when it began a two-hour-long afternoon drive-time sports talk show hosted by record company executive and sports fan Rick Baumgartner, along with former WSMV sportscaster Charlie McAlexander. Also, former WSM-AM and WSMV personality Teddy Bart launched his critically-acclaimed "Roundtable" interview program on WLAC's morning schedule in 1985. The show, which featured newsmakers in Tennessee politics, later moved to several other Nashville stations before discontinuing production in 2005.
Much in the same manner as in years past when network programming gave way at sunset to R&B music for a different audience, for many years after WLAC changed to news and talk, the station abruptly switched, at 8 p.m. Central Time (when the clear-channel signal settled into place) to an all-religion format. The nighttime line-up included mostly paid broadcasts of many evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal preachers, with the news/talk format resuming at daybreak (after the Hoss Allen show). This practice was discontinued shortly after the station's purchase by Clear Channel Communications.
[edit] Currently
WLAC is now the Nashville home for popular conservative talkers such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity. Also heard are Coast to Coast AM and University of Tennessee athletics. WLAC's main competitor is WWTN, an FM talk radio station. The station is an affiliate of Fox News Radio.
[edit] Miscellanea
The WLAC callsign once also applied to a Nashville FM station (105.9, now WNRQ) and TV station (Channel 5, now WTVF). They, along with the AM station, were once owned by the Life and Casualty Insurance Company of Tennessee (hence the callsign, also sometimes said to stand for We Love All Christians). The FM station is now owned by Clear Channel, and remains a sister station to WLAC. The TV station left the family in 1975, when it was sold to the Hobby family of Houston (it is now owned by Landmark Communications).
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- 1510 WLAC Official site
- Query the FCC's AM station database for WLAC
- WLAC Radio: The Unofficial Webpage - station history
- History of WLAC
- Aircheck of John Richbourg ("John R."), circa 1970
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