Tune in
WUTC can be found at 88.1 FM. In addition to Afternoon Music, Winham also hosts WUTC’s Sunday Evening Music program weekly from 8-10 p.m. His surprising playlists and eye-opening conversations are augmented by select audience members who sit in and also share their musical expertise.
Richard Winham was 7 years old when he remembers first listening to the radio. It was the late 1950s in England. On the airwaves was a Saturday morning kids show hosted by a disc jockey named Uncle Mac. He played children’s favorites. Kids would write to him with their requests, and one of the frequently requested songs was Sparky’s Magic Piano. It’s about a little boy forced to take piano lessons who realizes that he has a “magic” piano that will make him sound like a virtuoso even though he just started playing.
Winham was born and reared near Croydon in South London. Growing up during the 1950s and 1960s in England was electric. It was exciting, invigorating, he says. When people think of 1960’s England, they think of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Traffic. They recall the hairstyles, the spirit of rebellion, the sweat, the nightclubs – but most importantly, the music. The music was always at the center of it all.
“Music was the currency in England,” Winham says, sitting outside the small studio of Chattanooga’s NPR affiliate and public radio station WUTC. “It defined who you were, defined the culture. I drank and slept it. It was everything.”
Winham, who will celebrate his 65th birthday at the end of this month, has been been in Chattanooga since 1976 and with WUTC radio for nearly 30 years. Today, he’s well-known as the host of Afternoon Music, offering an eclectic blend of new music and classics from 2-4 p.m. every weekday. He has been the champion of a musical menu for his listeners built on discovery, freedom and curiosity.
In his adolescence, Winham didn’t take school seriously. He messed around in class and was a general pain in the back-side to the nuns and teachers. Growing up in the era of a musical revolution, the lure of it was inescapable. The emergence of The Beatles he describes as “a boulder in a puddle.” They blew it all up. They were massively popular, a revelation in rock ‘n’ roll. Kids all around London and beyond began cutting their own hair in front of mirrors, cropping their own mop tops.
Following high school, kids in England take an evaluative exam that touches on five major subjects. Based upon the test’s results, a student chooses either to pursue university or head straight into the workforce. When the results came in the mail to the Winham household, Richard was understandably nervous. “I can still remember the tone, the tenor, the shrill my mother used when she read my scores,” he says.
“You failed the lot!” his mother wailed.
The line still sticks with him today, for more reasons than one.
Radio and music were Winham’s calling. He was sure of it. The other kids, they drank the Kool-Aid of conformity; marched the march; danced the dance.
When he told his mother of his radio plans, she shot him down faster than the drop of a needle.
“It really was a bad idea in late 1960’s England because there was the BBC and that was it,” he admits. “But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I had to be a part of it. I couldn’t play an instrument, so I figured I’d just play the records.”
Getting into the business was tough, says Winham. The only way in was to work for the BBC, and the only way to work for the network was to have previously worked for a pirate radio station. Such stations were infamous for broadcasting American-like Top 40 radio from boats three miles off the shore of England. Occasionally, the BBC would poach some of these disc jockeys. Winham wasn’t part of either camp.
After holding down a few odd jobs in the motherland, he moved to New York City for no other reason than a fresh start. He wanted to be enveloped in the energy of the most buzzing city in the world. Before wading into the radio waves, Winham hung out around the city and got acclimated to the hippy lifestyle. He stayed up late, worked at record stores, discovered new music and became the novelty English bloke in his group of friends.
He shakes his head and laughs at the first memory of trying to get his voice down on tape for a radio demo. He was with a friend named Wolf (most memorable for perfectly resembling a wolf) at his apartment in the West Village. The two sat down at a tape recorder as prepared as two rookies can be. Wolf suggested Winham have a drink, take the edge off. He gladly agreed. Wolf suggested another. Again, Winham agreed.
The two of them started this way on two separate occasions and each time it turned into an all-out party. Needless to say, no tape ever came out of a Wolf recording session.
A few months later, a friend of Winham’s who worked for a record company gave him his first chance. The friend knew an engineer who had an office in Midtown and the recording equipment to cut a tape. The room was a massive one with 15-foot ceilings and a lone microphone in the middle next to a stool. “He’s on the other side of the room and he goes, ‘I tell you what, when I point, start talking,'” Winham says with the same disbelief he had 40 years ago. “Really? I’m gonna do this?”
He made a tape, albeit a shoddy one. A month later, Winham got an early morning phone call. On the other end of the line was a classic radio voice. A big, deep, rich baritone.
“So you want to work in radio?” the voice asked.
“Yeah, man. Absolutely. That’s all I ever” Winham rambled.
“Well come on up and we’ll give you a shot on the weekends.”
An upstate New York station had modeled a show exactly like one popular in Philadelphia at the time – one that happened to have an English host.
“So the one upstate hired me because they had to have a Brit!” Winham says. “Even though the boss said I had one of the worst tapes he had ever heard. [He] had to have the Brit.” Winham spent six months taking a six-hour Greyhound bus back and forth to Utica, New York, to work the weekend show. Other gigs came and went. He spent many months slumming it in the Village, bouncing between record store jobs and radio shows.
Winham moved to Chattanooga in 1976 after another letter from a friend penning about another gig. This one was a mom-and-pop station that broadcast from a homemade shack on top of a hill in Red Bank.
“New York was a culture shock enough,” he says. “But when I moved down to Red Bank, I see the cowboy hats, boots, country music. Looking back on it, I must have seemed alien enough with the accent, but I was also playing music that was totally unfamiliar.”
Winham is known for introducing Chattanooga to a handful of genres and countless artists, from the Sex Pistols and The Velvet Underground to Elvis Costello and Patti Smith. The veteran DJ of punk and English rock began to grow a small but rabid cult following around the Scenic City.
“I still approach it the same way,” he says. “You play music that is a little challenging to the audience. It’s new, different, but I’ve learned that you balance it with the other stuff so that you don’t completely freak people out.”
Before becoming the focal point of WUTC, Winham was on a staff of five that, between them, had maybe 50 records on the shelf. He tried his hand at traffic updates, hanging out the side of helicopters with a wild man with flaming red hair. He did the overnight shift (to his sleep schedule’s dismay). Then he landed on the morning show.
“Before us, we would get Knoxville’s broadcast for the morning show and it was all classical music,” he says. “The guy had a voice like Sam the Eagle of The Muppets. Another big, deep voice. Pompous. Just brutal. So we started with only jazz in the mornings, and without a thousand heads over my shoulder I slowly crept in things like Steely Dan that sounded jazzish, and I worked my way from there.”
Hollie Daugherty, WUTC’s membership director and administrative assistant, has been in awe of Winham’s dedication and appreciation for not only Chattanooga’s local music scene, but his willingness to learn about and grow his own music library.
“I first heard Richard back in 2003 and he played a song by Sufjan Stevens. And it just blew me away that this established British guy knew so much about this small indie artist,” she says. “So I began to really rely on Richard and his show because this was before Napster and Shazam. He was the one who played the artists 15, 20 years before they headlined major festivals.”
When asked to describe Winham in just a few words, Daugherty rattles them off in a speedy procession.
“Knowledgeable, inquisitive, responsive, appreciative, supremely supportive. He’s the oracle of Chattanooga’s music scene,” she says. “And the best thing about him and the dedication to his show is that he gives you the backgrounds of artists. He connects the dots and creates the bridge between artist and audience.”
Bringing an eclectic and unique set of songs to the people has always been a delightful challenge for Winham. He relishes the idea of sitting down before a show and not knowing what’s coming next. His process before every show has always been the same: Five minutes before he goes on air, he picks one song. “And I never know what the second one is going to be,” he says. “It just comes to me.
“It’s like a performance. I have to feel the story of the show. One song blends into another and into another.”
What makes Winham’s show and personality so intriguing is his genuine interest in the bands and artists that come across his desk or into his studio. He loves the idea of discovering someone new, giving them the platform to showcase their talents. This motivates him: his curiosity and undying love for music.
“The most creative and talented people are usually the ones with the most self-doubt,” Winham says.
Another supreme inspiration to Winham was longtime BBC radio host John Peel. Peel was one of Britain’s most beloved broadcasters and left behind a cherished legacy of storytelling.
Winham brings up an example of how off-beat Peel’s philosophy was in a time when a young Richard was trying to find himself as a person. The BBC had a show titled Why Work? where hosts would come on and lecture listeners on how important it is to join the workforce and become an upstanding citizen. Peel took a different spin on it. He got behind the mic and asked his listeners, “Why work, really? Do we have to? No, here’s what you can do instead”
“And he would go off the rails – left, right, sideways, backwards – and it was just a delight,” Winham says. “He was a huge inspiration to me in just the way I looked at life. He took such a different philosophical approach to life and to radio.”
Peel’s broadcasts and point of view had Winham head over heels for radio from then on out. He even wrote his entire dissertation on Peel, the BBC and radio itself to get his doctorate in Communications from UTC.
“When my committee accepted it, all I could hear was my mother’s voice,” Winham says. “‘You failed the lot!’ That stuck with me. That felt rather nice.”
Stay tuned
After all these years in Chattanooga, Winham keeps working. He keeps discovering. In the WUTC studio, framed posters hang on the wall behind him. They’re all of Nightfall, Chattanooga’s premier concert series that highlights up-and-coming artists from all over the country. The shows are free for the public, a treat to the city; publicly funded, much like public radio.
Winham holds a chief opinion when it comes to selecting bands and artists.
“I come in every day and want to hear something I’ve never heard before,” he says. “The first time I heard I Want to Hold Your Hand That feeling, that’s what I’m searching for.”