Ten Years Ago This Morning, MTSU’s Station Stopped Playing Jazz at 11 O’Clock Sharp
At eleven o'clock on a Friday morning ten years ago today, a radio station in Murfreesboro stopped being one thing and started being another. WMOT 89.5 had spent 47 years playing a mix of classical, jazz and news-talk. On Sept. 2, 2016, it threw the whole format out and became an all-Americana station.
Stations do not usually do this. A format is an audience, and an audience is a membership base, and public radio runs on membership. Changing it is closer to changing the name of a town than to changing a playlist.
They marked the switch by broadcasting live from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, with Jim Lauderdale, Suzy Bogguss, Mike Farris and Will Hoge playing, along with a cast of bluegrass players. It was, in effect, a station introducing itself to a city it had been broadcasting to since April 1969.
The part that looks smart in hindsight
The bet was that there was a real audience for the amalgam of bluegrass, folk, gospel, soul, country and blues that gets filed under Americana, and that nobody in this market was serving it. WMOT is licensed to Middle Tennessee State University and operated out of its Scott Borchetta College of Media and Entertainment, and it pushes 100,000 watts — a signal that carries as far north as Bowling Green, Kentucky, and south to the Alabama line.
What makes the ten-year mark worth noting is not the anniversary itself but the names. In the years since the switch the station put early airtime behind Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, Sierra Ferrell, The War and Treaty and Allison Russell. Read that list again and remember it was assembled by a college station in Rutherford County, not by a chart. Several of those artists were nowhere near a stadium when 89.5 started playing them.
What got built after the format flip
The format was the beginning, not the achievement. Within a month of the switch the station launched Finally Friday, a weekly live performance series that now runs at 3rd & Lindsley and books three to five months out. Wired In followed in early 2017, opening with Béla Fleck, and grew into a members' concert series. The Local Brew arrived in 2018 to put local artists in daily rotation rather than in a weekend ghetto. Webb Wilder counts down the top albums on The List; Craig Havighurst hosts The String; there is a bluegrass and old-time hour, a Sunday gospel show, and a Sunday-night eclectic roots slot. In the fall of 2017 the station added an AmericanaFest day stage, a multi-day marathon that now runs at East Side Bowl in Madison.
The current numbers are modest and real: about 2,400 members, with a stated goal of 3,000 by 2027, and a music library somewhere in the range of 17,000 to 20,000 songs spanning six decades. The station makes a point that the songs are chosen by people rather than generated by software — an unfashionable position that is starting to look like a selling point. Its video channel passed a million cumulative views and added roughly 2,500 subscribers in the past year.
Why this is a Murfreesboro story
Because it is Murfreesboro's station. The transmitter, the license and the students all belong to MTSU, and the people learning to run a board and book a session are doing it here, on a signal that reaches two other states. Rutherford County has a habit of taking music seriously in ways that do not make headlines — the county school system was just named a Best Communities for Music Education district for the eighth straight year — and a 100,000-watt Americana station operating out of a university that also just reopened its oldest building after a $54 million renovation belongs in that same column.
The station is marking the day with two gatherings, both open-air-casual rather than ticketed productions: a lunch beginning at 11:30 a.m. at Brown's Diner, 2102 Blair Blvd., and a happy hour from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at Robert's Western World on Lower Broadway, each with live music and station staff on hand. Ten years in, the format that was supposed to be a risk is simply what 89.5 sounds like.
