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| Wayne Winkler |
On Monday, January 2, 1984, Blue Monday debuted
on WETS, 89.5-FM, East Tennessee State University’s
Public Radio station. As 2005 begins, Blue Monday celebrates
its 21 st birthday and a sort of “coming of age.”
Blue Monday, heard every Monday afternoon from 12:30 to 4:00, has
become a weekly staple for thousands of listeners across the Tri-Cities region.
The program focuses on the blues, a uniquely American musical style whose
popularity has spread around the globe.
“Time sure flies when you’re having fun,” says Blue
Monday host Wayne Winkler. Now the station director
at WETS-FM, Winkler was an announcer/producer in 1984,
and he was host of a one-hour Saturday night program called Blues
People when then-program director Phil Leonard suggested
he try hosting an afternoon blues program.
“I could have chosen any day of the week to do it,” Winkler
says, “but I chose Monday because I could use the Fats
Domino song as a theme.” While many public radio stations
across the country have a weekly blues show, most of those
are aired on Friday or Saturday nights. Monday afternoons,
however, offered a larger potential audience.
“I also felt that, for most people, Monday is the
beginning of the work week, and that’s when people
can really use some good blues music. What I didn’t realize
at the time was that this meant I’d have to work on
all the Monday holidays!”
Winkler, a long-time blues aficionado, had an extensive
collection of blues LPs that formed the early foundation
of the program. Record companies, eager to get radio airplay
for their products, quickly began supplementing that collection
with releases by contemporary blues artists along with compilations
of earlier material. Compact discs soon replaced vinyl records,
and today the WETS blues library features thousands of recordings,
ranging from re-issues of the earliest recorded blues of
the 1920s and ’30s to the most recent releases.
From the beginning, the show was a hit with listeners,
many of whom first discovered the blues by listening to WETS
on Monday afternoons.
“Many people think the blues is sad, slow music,” according
to Winkler, “but there have always been a lot of up-tempo
songs as well. The blues is an expression of the human spirit.
The songs may often deal with sadness, loneliness, or loss,
but the music transcends the pain that we all feel at one
time or another. The blues is about surviving that pain and
rising above it. It’s a celebration of life itself – the
good parts and the bad.”
In 1986, Winkler attended the Chicago Blues Festival in
Grant Park. Almost as an afterthought, he brought along a
tape recorder. “I thought I might have a chance to
interview some of the artists, and could use those interviews
on my show.”
Chicago public radio station WBEZ broadcast the evening
performances and transmitted them to other public stations
via satellite. WETS recorded those performances, and when
Winkler returned to the station, he combined his interviews
with the performances and created a dozen or so hour-long
programs aired during Blue Monday.
These Festival programs were an immediate hit, and, for
the next 10 years, Winkler made an annual pilgrimage to the
Windy City, interviewing dozens of renowned blues artists
including Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, Koko Taylor,
Johnny Shines, John Lee Hooker, David “Honeyboy” Edwards,
Luther Allison, and many others.
For Winkler, the opportunity to meet and talk with these
legendary performers was a dream come true. “There
were many moments when I’d be watching a performance
by someone whose records I’d been listening to for
years, and I’d be thinking, ‘And I get PAID to
do this!’ It doesn’t get much better than that.”
Although the Chicago Blues Festival continues to be held
every June, funding cuts forced WBEZ to discontinue broadcasting
the music that was the foundation of Winkler’s programs. The last of these programs was aired in 1997.
Blue Monday regularly features local and
regional blues artists. In 1991, WETS and the Down Home put
on the first annual Little Chicago Blues Festival as a benefit
for the station, featuring a half dozen acts over two nights.
This event proved so popular with the performers that the
next year the festival was expanded to three nights, with
four acts per night.
The performers who play at the Little Chicago Blues Festival
often give up potentially lucrative weekend jobs to support
WETS-FM. “We’re the
only station in the area that programs a significant amount of real blues,” says
Winkler. “It’s really gratifying to know that these musicians
support what we’re doing and are willing to help. Some of these
bands have been here nearly every year that we’ve had the Festival.”
Johnson City was once nicknamed “Little Chicago” due to the
community’s
reputation as a center for bootleg alcohol during Prohibition. Held annually
during the last weekend in April, the Little Chicago Blues Festival has
become a showcase event for regional blues artists from as far away as
Knoxville and Raleigh.
“Each performer or band plays for about an hour, and the audience gets
a nice variety of music in the course of the evening,” says Winkler. “The
festival usually raises several hundred dollars for the station, but, more importantly,
it gives the performers exposure with people who, in many cases, were not familiar
with these artists. It’s a community party, and the money we raise is really
of secondary importance.”
Back
in 1984, Winkler never imagined that he would still be playing
the blues on Mondays 21 years later. “Actually, it’s
pretty rare in this business that anyone stays at the same
station that long.” Nationally, public radio has become
more homogenous, with fewer stations offering “specialty” programs,
especially during daytime hours.
WETS has changed somewhat
over the years as well, but still offers programs aimed
at more specialized audiences. And even though Winkler now
has managerial duties demanding his attention, he still looks
forward to Monday afternoons.
Since WETS began streaming audio on the Internet, the audience
is no longer restricted to those who live within range of
the WETS transmitter. Winkler often gets e-mail requests
from all over the United States, and beyond. “It’s
a real thrill to find out that someone in San Francisco or London has discovered
the program and is listening online.”
As a youngster, Winkler could sometimes
pick up WLAC, the clear channel AM station from Nashville that featured
blues and R&B. “I loved it when I could get [disc jockey] John R. late
at night. Not only was the music great, but I got a kick out of the idea that
I was sitting there in the Midwest, listening to this station from ‘deep
in the heart of Dixie,’ as they used to say on the air. The Internet
gives a station worldwide coverage, and every so often I’ll get an e-mail
from some place far from here, and it reminds me that someone, somewhere, might
be discovering the blues just like I did – on the radio.”
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