After graduating college as a
music major and taking up a career as a modern-day minstrel (more or less),
Joel Mann packed up his trusty guitar, departed his native Virginia, and
settled in the cooler New England climes, where he spent the next two decades
plucking out “roots” sounds.
Eventually he found himself
over in East Orland, Maine, where he discovered WERU and volunteered as a
platter-jockey. Somewhere during his five to six year span at the microphone
he was bitten unceremoniously by the “radio bug.” In an effort to broaden his
experience, he also began doing part time work for some commercial outlets,
learning the nuts and bolts of commercial radio, and later started up a couple
of stations. But just as his commercial career began to lift off in the area,
the seductive finger of community radio beckoned with the offer of a program
directorship¾and that sounded just
fine to Joel.
In the early ‘90s he was doing
Red Sox baseball games, among other things, but managed to keep his hand in as
a volunteer with WERU. He ran a couple of “roots” programs there (e.g. “House
of Blue Lights”) and also started an Americana show. (When he took over as
program director of WERU, about 3 yrs ago, one of the first things he did was
to turn the morning show ¾“Morning
Maine”¾into an Americana program.) A
key aspect of the show is to play cuts from a featured artist every morning
throughout the week, and, at the end of that week, Joel interviews that artist
on his segment of the show. “That works really well at introducing people to
the wide range that roots music covers. We include all of it; we have some
zydeco, some folk, some Americana, some swing, and even some honky-tonk.”
There are also some live
performances (“We support the local artists as much as we can”), as well as
regular short features produced by local folks (e.g. Awanadjo
Almanac—primarily a nature show, and Next of Kin—an animal show). And, of
course, there are the specialty music programs, including bluegrass shows and
“some incredible” blues programs (“Blues Hangout,” “Blues the Healer,” and
“Barefoot Blues,” an acoustic blues show), as well as lot of roots music
scattered within WERU’s Triple A format.
“Roots music,” he offers, “is
where the real music is being made these days. It’s the musician first, and
the marketing second, and that’s pretty rare in the industry these days.”
WERU was started in 1989 by Noel Stookey (the “Paul” of Peter, Paul, and
Mary), who used part of his royalties from his early ‘70s hit record “The
Wedding Song” to get it off the ground. “We used to rent our studio space
out of his headquarters,” reflects Joel. We did that for eight or nine
years and then we bought our own building a couple of years ago. We’re
community-supported grass roots radio¾the
people’s radio station out in the boonies¾now
in our 13th year. In the winter we have about 22,000 listeners at
any given time, and in the summer it goes through the roof, because we have
2½ million tourists visiting the Acadia National Park. The station did a
fund-raiser in late August and got “donations from just about every state in
the union.”
