King’s Crown JamboreeCountry

This month, WKCR will be reviving our country music festival, a staple of our annual programming for roughly 30 years. Performing a thorough archival search for all relevant information is probably impossible, and I certainly was not going to attempt it for an article of this scope. Even so, it is undeniable that Country music programming is one of WKCR’s longest-running traditions, dating back to at least the 1950s, according to our website.

Assuming that this is true, country music on KCR predates most other major country radio programming in the city. The dedicated country radio format as most know it—a hallmark of the era of radio ubiquity—was the product of a concerted effort by the country music industry to expand and solidify its markets in the mid-20th century. In response to the new affluence and suburbanization of their traditional white working class audience, as well as major changes in broadcast technology and standards, industry leaders effected a decades-long push to entrench their product in the suburban middle class. Along with rewriting the music’s perception as “backwards” and disreputable, leaders enacted a large-scale effort to create country-music-only radio stations in major cities across the country. This effort culminated with New York City’s first-ever country station, which began broadcasting in 1964, one year after WKCR began its Bluegrass program, which still continues today.

By the time we began the country festival as an annual tradition (in the 1980s, it would seem), the country radio format was a staple of all American markets, although it was becoming a bit outdated. Country music had long occupied a relatively stable niche of the popular music economy, and although its crossover potential had largely evaporated with rock’s dominance in the 1960s, the country music world itself was relatively successful until it began to lose its audience near the end of the 1970s.

WKCR’s programming has generally taken a more traditionalist approach than commercial country radio. While that (rather hegemonic) format has tried to appease both popular audiences and the latest push of major record labels, our broadcasts, even then, generally favored country music of yore, such as Hank Williams Sr. and even the likes of Jimmy Rodgers. Listeners who preferred these more traditional sounds were rarely serviced by commercial country radio by the time it reached the Big Apple, as the focus on

“sounding modern” led stations to eschew the sounds of eras past and give traditionalists a smaller and smaller share of the airplay pie.

As the country radio format exploded once again in the 1990s, eventually accounting for a plurality of all music radio stations in the US, the music it broadcast became increasingly divisive for traditionalists; in fact, the moniker “new country” is still sometimes used to refer to the products of the Nashville machine from Garth Brooks onwards. WKCR, unsurprisingly, never particularly embraced this renaissance. Our priorities were never much tied to commercial developments, and particularly in the era of New Country, this was most frequently expressed as a complete aversion to the commercial scene. Even today, you are far more likely to hear contemporary outsiders and revivalists in the Americana movement on our airwaves than you are any stylized Nashville neo-traditionalists of the 1990s and beyond, like Alan Jackson or Dierks Bentley.

New York City listeners never had the same opportunity to immerse themselves in New Country over the airwaves as listeners did elsewhere in the country. Even after 1964, country radio in the city was never particularly stable and rarely constituted a significant share of the commercial market. By the mid-2000s, as radio began hemorrhaging profits in the digital age, the nation’s largest media market was without a country radio station.

WKCR has continued to serve the country traditionalists of New York City, particularly those whose tastes and technologies did not keep up with the switch to digital music. This project has in recent years become increasingly fulfilling, as more and more listeners have become dissatisfied with the increasingly intolerable schlock turned out by the soulless vestiges of Nashville’s domestic country music production. Yet listeners have had few places to turn. Several country stations have come and gone, with the most recent establishing itself in 2013 (the year after our last country music festival) and switching formats again in 2021. With the return of our country music festival, we hope to speak to the special power of non-commercial radio. We will be doing what no other station in New York does: play only country music, for an entire weekend, simulating life as a genre-exclusive station. But we will also be doing what commercial stations do not do: play music from across styles, eras, and traditions within the Country music umbrella. Although broken up into three-hour segments, we will be playing Nashville Sound George Jones, 78era banjo groups, Mexican-American music of the Rio Grande, and boundary-pushing contemporary bluegrass all on the same platform. It will be a vision of what country music can be and has been when it is merely about loving the sounds and not about turning a profit.