WLAC

This article is about the radio station. For West Los Angeles College, see West Los Angeles College.
WLAC
City of license Nashville, Tennessee
Broadcast area Nashville, Tennessee
Branding NewsRadio 1510 WLAC
Slogan Tennessee's News, Traffic, and Weather Station
Frequency 1510 kHz
(also on HD Radio)
First air date November 24, 1926
Format Analog/HD: News/Talk
Power 50,000 watts
Class A
Facility ID 34391
Callsign meaning Life And Casualty (reference to former owner)
Affiliations Fox News Radio
Vanderbilt IMG Sports Network
Owner iHeartMedia, Inc.
Sister stations WNRQ, WRVW, WSIX, WUBT
Webcast Listen Live
Website wlac.com

WLAC is a clear channel radio station based in Nashville, Tennessee, operating at 1510 kHz on the AM dial. WLAC is the only 50,000 watt, Class A station in North America which operates on 1510 AM,[1] sharing the frequency with 50,000 watt Class B[2] station KGA, Spokane WA and 50,000 watt Class B station WMEX,[3] Boston (which WLAC protects at night since WMEX pre-dated WLAC on the frequency). Owned by iHeartMedia, Inc., the station's studios are located in Nashville's Music Row district and the transmitter site is in the city's northside.

Early history

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. Studios were located on the fifth floor of the Life and Casualty building in downtown Nashville. In 1928, it became Nashville's CBS Radio affiliate, a link that has remained to this day.

The early years of the station featured, as most big-city stations of that time, network programming, 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.

In 1942, the station boosted its power to 50,000 watts, becoming the second clear-channel station in Tennessee behind WSM. Its daytime signal is somewhat weaker than that of WSM (due in part to WLAC's higher frequency on the dial) whose daytime signal reaches parts of five states. For instance, close-in suburbs like Murfreesboro get only a grade B signal from WLAC; however, its nighttime signal reaches parts of 28 states and three Canadian provinces.

The nighttime R & B years

By the 1950s, however, WLAC would achieve a distinctive notoriety of its own, the nighttime station for half the nation. 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, 1960's and into the 1970s. 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 and southern Canada, were within range of the station's nighttime signal; the music heard on WLAC played a notable role in the development of ska music as a result.[4] WLAC was particularly popular with some young white 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 whom 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 like Royal Crown Hair Pomade or chicken hatcheries, which packaged baby scrub roosters and other undesirable stock in large quantities for sale. 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.

WLAC Sales Manager E.G. Blackman sought to hire the nation’s first African-American news radio broadcaster, Don Whitehead. Whitehead, a graduate of Tennessee State University, began his career shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Whitehead announced the news at the top of the hour during the nighttime hours. He traveled around the viewing area to promote the historically black colleges and universities and played a big role in increasing enrollment of African-Americans attending college.

Performers of later years, such as Johnny Winter, and Allman brothers Duane and Greg, have credited 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.

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. Changing tastes also brought about an imminent demise to record labels such as Stax, which were major suppliers of music heard on the R&B/Soul shows.

To replace the retiring jocks, the station recruited young Spider Harrison, a native New Yorker who at the time was an afternoon urban air personality and program director at WTLC-FM in Indianapolis. Harrison steered the nighttime format into a blend of soul and rock, in an attempt to target an entire new generation of young night-time listeners throughout the country. However, WLAC appeared to gain little Arbitron improvements from local listeners, 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.

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 1986, 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, WSMV and WKRN 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.

For many years until 2010, WLAC was the Nashville home of the Tennessee Volunteers, beaming Volunteer games to most of the eastern half of North America at night. Since 2012, WLAC Now serves as the home station and Flagship Station for the Vanderbilt Commodores IMG Sports Network.

Currently

WLAC is the Nashville home for several popular conservative talk shows. WLAC's main competitor is WWTN, an FM talk radio station. The station is an affiliate of Fox News Radio.

Weekday schedule

Weekend programming

Weekend programming includes sporting events and repeats of syndicated programs from during the week, plus The Eldon Thacker Show, which is heard Sunday nights at 10pm, featuring a "Theater of the mind" format revolving around a musical playlist ranging from Americana, R&B, Soul, Blues, Classic Country, novelty and others.

Call letter history

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). The FM station is now owned by iHeartMedia, 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 the E. W. Scripps Company).

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/amq?state=&call=&arn=&city=&freq=1510&fre2=1510&single=1&type=3&facid=&class=&list=1&dist=&dlat2=&mlat2=&slat2=&NS=N&dlon2=&mlon2=&slon2=&EW=W&size=9
  2. ↑ http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/amq?list=0&facid=11234
  3. ↑ http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/amq?call=WMEX
  4. ↑ "Jazz to Ska Mania". Jazz Times. Retrieved 2010-05-28.

External links

Coordinates: 36°16′15″N 86°45′24″W / 36.27083°N 86.75667°W