Radio, the medium that built America’s epic 20th century music business, has regularly been declared “dead” in the 21st. But on Sept. 2, 2016, against all odds, a new radio voice was born in Middle Tennessee, one that was focused on amplifying and enhancing Nashville’s legacy as “Music City USA.” Ten years later, WMOT Roots Radio 89.5 FM has established itself as a dynamic regional radio station and a national authority and taste-maker in Americana music.
Operated as a public service of Middle Tennessee State University and its Scott Borchetta College of Media and Entertainment, WMOT is supported by its listener community, including a membership of 2400 (amid a campaign to reach 3000 members in 2027). WMOT’s staff of radio veterans maintain a dialogue with the middle Tennessee community, staging scores of live performance events in and around Nashville, while curating a peerless on-air music mix, based on a core playlist of almost 20,000 songs.
From its outset, Roots Radio has emphasized music discovery for its audience and artistic development for the Nashville music community. The station has been on the front edge of numerous careers during its years on the air, including early support for little-known artists Billy Strings, Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, Sierra Ferrell, The War And Treaty, Allison Russell, and many more. It has also championed diversity and equity in roots music, enthusiastically programming roots music by women and minority artists.
At a time when some sectors of the music business are experiencing crises of authenticity, WMOT is human curated and forever AI-free, in tune with the values of roots music’s songwriters and artists. A national and international audience has noticed, populating an online and app-based audience about as large as the regional audience reached by the station’s 100,000 watt FM signal.
WMOT 89.5 FM first went on the air in 1969 as a student-run radio station playing rock and pop, plus student-driven talk and news programming. In 1970 it became a charter member of the new National Public Radio network, adding its signature shows Morning Edition and All Things Considered. In 1982, and for 30 years thereafter, WMOT shifted its programming to jazz under the leadership of program director Greg Lee. Under the brand Jazz 89, WMOT promoted Music City’s jazz scene through remote broadcasts and the launch of the Cookeville Jazz Festival.
By the 2010s, WMOT had lost its identity, programming classical music by day, syndicated jazz at night, and NPR news shows, a mix that the community was not getting behind. That’s when Ken Paulson MTSU’s dean of media and entertainment, as well as a music fan and creator of the touring show Freedom Sings, proposed a total refresh with an all Americana music format. Val Hoeppner, Executive Director of MTSU’s Center For Innovation In Media and a music fan herself, backed the vision, signing on as the station’s executive director. A commissioned study about the future of the signal endorsed bold change, warning that in a competitive Nashville radio market, WMOT had one chance to get it right.
The Roots Radio vision was shaped in partnership with Music City Roots, by then a nationally syndicated weekly live radio and public television music showcase broadcasting and webcasting out of the Factory in Franklin. The show had lost its radio partner, and Paulson struck a deal with MCR’s John Walker and Todd Mayo to grant the Roots Radio brand to MTSU and WMOT, with the show airing live on Wednesday nights. Walker joined the station as morning host, event producer and strategic advisor. The show’s emcee Keith Bilbrey, a veteran of the Grand Ole Opry, joined the on-air team. MCR interview host and journalist Craig Havighurst joined the WMOT staff, launching its deep-dive interview show The String.
Also, in a well-timed bit of kismet, Jessie Scott, probably Americana radio’s most successful and influential DJ and curator, moved to Nashville from New York seeking a new challenge. The match was obvious to all involved. She signed on as WMOT’s program director, and the new format launched on Sept. 2, 2016 with a live ceremonial broadcast from the Country Music Hall of Fame. Ken Paulson described the musical format as one that “respects and reflects the music that is written, performed and recorded all over this town.” The artists performing live that day, including Jim Lauderdale, Suzy Bogguss, Mike Farris, Will Hoge, and a cast of bluegrass all-stars - were a harbinger of the quality and depth that would follow on the air.
The first year of Roots Radio was not without bumps. Old computers wouldn’t run the new automation software without crashing. Power surges knocked the station off the air. The transmitter was coming to the end of its natural life and needed replacement at significant cost. But Hoeppner steered the ship through choppy water while building dialogue with Nashville artists, music venues, record labels, and the staff at NPR Music in Washington. When Americanafest 2016 came to Nashville a couple of weeks after the Roots Radio launch, a Roots Radio exhibit hall table attracted overwhelming interest in the station’s new mission.
While Jessie Scott wanted the station’s main focus to be on establishing its diverse and deep playlist as the core of the station’s sound, she did oversee the addition of a few special shows and showcases. Finally Friday, a live, weekly three-artist bill presented free of charge at Nashville’s famous Family Wash, launched in October of 2016. It is still on the air, broadcasting weekly from 3rd & Lindsley, and demand by leading and emerging artists to play the show is so strong it is typically booked 3-5 months out. About the same time, veteran roots rocker and satellite radio host Webb Wilder came aboard to host The List, WMOT’s weekly countdown show spotlighting the Top 40 albums being spun by Americana Music Association stations nationwide. Webb is still hosting the show 10 years later, and he has been added as a daily WMOT DJ as well.
Early 2017 saw the launch of Wired In with a performance by multi-Grammy winning banjo star Béla Fleck. The show, WMOT’s exclusive monthly concert series for its sustaining members, has hosted the greatest names in Americana in intimate settings, recently including Rodney Crowell, Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider, Ruston Kelly, Daniel Donato, Sarah Jarosz, Drew Holcomb, Sierra Hull, Dan Tyminski, Darrell Scott & Rob Ickes, and Kim Richey. The hour-long sets are carried live on the air, giving the artists reach, while the show’s carefully chosen spaces (lately Riverside Revival in East Nashville) foster WMOT’s community of fans and supporters. In 2025, the concept expanded into Wired In Sessions, shorter online performances captured at WMOT’s East Nashville studio.
The fall of 2017 gave WMOT its first opportunity to make a statement at Nashville’s annual AmericanaFest, and it went big with the inauguration of what would become the festival’s official Day Stage, then and now produced in cooperation with NPR Music and NPR show World Cafe. On what amounted to its first birthday, the station erected a large tent venue in a downtown lot. Production teams from MTSU and Music City Roots worked together to produce an astonishing marathon presenting 23 artists over three days and nights. WMOT maintained and grew the Americanafest Day Stage, which remains a mainstay of the event, packing in audiences at (and broadcasting/streaming from) East Side Bowl in Madison.
WMOT’s on-air staff grew more professionalized, including the hiring of trusted Nashville radio voice and musical taste-maker Ana Lee in 2018. Besides hosting weekday afternoons, she created one of the station’s anchoring brands, The Local Brew. With a playlist that focuses on established and charting Americana talent, as well as a deep catalog of legacy music, WMOT needed a vehicle for Music City’s emerging artist talent pool, and the Local Brew fit the bill. With two components - a daily one-song feature and a weekly hour-long roundup of talent with interviews - the Local Brew has given countless artists their first chance to hear themselves on the radio.
The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020/21 posed unique challenges for musicians and their business, and WMOT adjusted along with them. DJs tracked their shows in home studios when MTSU’s campus shut down. Finally Friday went dark for the first time. With musicians needing an outlet, WMOT figured out how to make Zoom serve the situation, and the new show Words And Music was born. Val Hoeppner served as engineer, while Jessie Scott hosted a performance/interview format that survives as in-person sessions to this day. They sometimes produced and broadcast multiple shows per day and attracted some impressive guests, including George Thorogood and Jimmy Buffett.
Whereas in its early years, WMOT’s leaders emphasized establishing the sound and mix of its Roots Radio format, with time, the window opened for more genre-focused specialty shows. They’ve included The Old Fashioned, the bluegrass and old-time hour hosted by Craig Havighurst and Amy Alvey, Somebody Say Amen, the Sunday morning eclectic gospel show hosted by the much loved Rev. Fred, and Strange Roots Radio, Sunday night’s hyper-eclectic look at the outer edges of roots music curated and hosted by members of the band Cordovas.
In recent years, WMOT has invested more than ever in live performance video production, marked by the hiring of two MTSU graduates and former WMOT interns Jessica Rigsby as video director and Erika Nalow as audio engineer. They made it easier for WMOT to accept an invitation to take over video sessions from the prestigious 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida. They’ve taken Words And Music to the station’s video platforms and have facilitated a consistent flow of professionally produced music to the station’s long-dormant YouTube channel. In the past year, the channel has added 2,500 new subscribers and has surpassed a million cumulative views.
Another key addition has been Sr. Events Coordinator Shilah Morrow, a country and roots music veteran who has truly done it all in the industry and who has a deep network of trust among artists, musicians, and creatives. She's allowed WMOT to accelerate its tempo of live events, which will count almost 100 separate shows in town before 2026 is over.
As it embarks on a new decade, WMOT Roots Radio has never been in a stronger place. It is now regarded as a national powerhouse of advocacy and discovery in its target genres, akin to Seattle’s KEXP, Philadelphia’s WXPN, and Santa Monica’s KCRW. Val Hoeppner has gone from a music industry novice to a leading voice for Americana and independent broadcasting within NPR and on Capitol Hill. Jessie Scott continues to sift through remarkable quantities of new music to find the artists worthy of a place in the station’s rotation. WMOT ignores the formula programming that ushered in so much decline in the public’s interest in music on the radio, chiefly by maintaining a music library with about 17,000 songs spanning at least six decades, and by maintaining an album focus on artists rather than repeated singles.
WMOT’s listeners and members are the kind of engaged music fans that sustain American culture. They report happily keeping WMOT on all day long, because it’s diverse and commercial free. That audience is local, state-wide, national and international, as the station knows from monitoring its robust online webcasting presence. It is, as the station says, “Radio Of, By, And For The People” - a mission solid and inspiring enough to carry on.
