Listening to the Opry, just like Grandpa

For years, we had a great public radio station here in town. The broadcast studios for the station, formerly KUMR and then later KMST to reflect the university’s name, were located in the basement of the campus library. The station played a range of music, folk, blues, classical, big band and bluegrass.
I especially liked the bluegrass programs, Bluegrass for a Saturday Night from 7-10 p.m., Sunday Morning Sounds from 7-9 a.m.
Five hours of bluegrass every weekend from the public radio station were joined with five or six hours on Saturday morning on a commercial station. The host of that show was named Ray Hicks, and when his station sold, he was quickly snatched up by another commercial station, although his program was cut to three hours every Saturday morning. Sadly, Ray had a stroke and was unable to continue; he passed away a couple of years ago.
The public radio host was Wayne Bledsoe, a history professor who had a long involvement with bluegrass going back to his North Carolina childhood. He played a good mix of traditional and contemporary bluegrass tunes on Saturday night and good bluegrass gospel with a dab of Southern gospel on Sunday morning.
I said once or twice or more in my newspaper column that Wayne’s Sunday morning bluegrass show was better than a sermon when it came to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Well, the university got tired of running the station after many decades, I reckon, and they sold it to St. Louis Public Radio, who immediately killed the gospel program, let go all the local folks who worked there and eliminated the local programming, such as the Backyard Birder feature. If Rolla people are interested in what’s going on in St. Louis, though, KMST is the station to turn to.
Before much time elapsed, Wayne announced his retirement and he played his last bluegrass tunes a couple of months ago. Sad time for us bluegrass fans who for years and years had listened on most Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.
Now there is plenty to listen to on the radio these days, especially if you have a Smartphone, I have discovered. I bought one of those Tracfone pay as you go Androids, and I hook iinto our home internet service so I don’t use any minutes. I can listen to just about any radio station in the country, I guess, thanks to apps like Tune-in and I Heart Radio. Plus, I have some Pandora channels that I have created.
So I have plenty to listen to. My favorite stations are KFWR-FM out of Fort Worth, which plays Texas and “Red Dirt” artists; KTXR-FM out of Springfield, which has changed its easy listening format to outlaw country, and several bluegrass outlets, like WAMU, I think, which is from somewhere east. On Pandora, I listen to my Flatt and Scruggs channel and my Don Edwards cowboy music channel.
On Saturday nights, I like to use one of the apps to pick up the Grand Ole Opry on WSM, the legendary station from Nashville.
I heard the Grand Ole Opry quite a bit when I was a kid, for we didn’t have television, and you could hear it well on an AM radio back then because there wasn’t near the clutter on the airwaves there is today. Also, we would drive three hours to central Missouri every 4-6 weeks to see my grandparents, and that is what we usually listened to on the Saturday night drives after my dad closed his barbershop and came home and got us. That was where I got my love of Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs.
When we got to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, they’d have the Opry on, too, until they finally got TV some years later.
So on Saturday night, listening to the Grand Ole Opry, I figure I’m turning into my grandpa.