May 30, 2013 4 min read

On Jan. 1, 2003, Washington’s radio station WKZV did something that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the region.

If you were recovering from the excesses of the night before, you could listen to a Hank Williams marathon on WKZV to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Williams’ death. Despite being a Mount Rushmore-worthy figure in the annals of country music – or, for that matter, American music of any genre – the semicentennial of Williams’ death was being studiously ignored everywhere else on the radio. Though Williams is the progenitor for every country artist who is strumming a guitar today, one assumes that those ancient, keening laments about mansions on hills, cheatin’ hearts, seeing the light, lovesick blues and being so lonesome you could cry just didn’t have the smooth, generic sound that passes for being radio-friendly in the 21st century.

And, like Williams himself, WKZV is now gone. If you tune to 1110 on the AM dial, you will hear only a never-ending grind of static until the news and talk station WBT from Charlotte, N.C., comes blasting up the East Coast when the sun goes down. The 1,000-watt station ceased operations May 16 when owner Helen Supinski was faced with the prospect of costly repairs to an aged transmitter. A letter submitted to the Federal Communications Commission a few days later by a lawyer for Supinski asked that the station’s license be canceled.

Transmitter woes or not, WKZV’s days were likely numbered. AM radio stations licensed to operate only during daylight hours, which was the case with WKZV, are a dying breed. Other local AM stations, such as WASP in Brownsville and WESA in Charleroi, preceded WKZV to the radio graveyard. And, even in the best of circumstances, AM is not where the action is in the radio world – its audience is primarily older and its formats now tend toward talk, religious programming and the occasional outlet that spins oldies. Like it or not, none of these formats or their audiences hit the sweet spot for advertisers. With the rise of satellite radio and a host of other Internet-driven options, some prognosticators believe the whole concept of terrestrial radio is nearing the end of its almost century-long life. Young listeners are stampeding to streaming services like Pandora and Spotify to get them through morning and afternoon rush hour.

In its last years, WKZV made few concessions to modernity. It didn’t have a website and didn’t stream live online. Disc jockeys used compact discs on the air as opposed to the computer programs that now guide most stations. When you tuned in to WKZV, it always seemed like the clock had stopped at 1980, or maybe sooner.

But that was part of its charm. While subsisting on a diet of music that, for the most part, pre-dated the rise of Garth Brooks in the early 1990s, it played material that couldn’t be heard anywhere else on the airwaves. Along with Williams, you could hear Merle Haggard, George Jones and Loretta Lynn on WKZV. They are largely consigned to history’s dustbin elsewhere on the radio, despite their lofty stature. Sometimes, on weekends, WKZV would spin polka tunes, music that is a vital part of this region’s heritage.

As letter writer George Lasko points out on this page today, WKZV provided a local voice. With so much of radio being dominated by focus groups, cookie-cutter formats and disc jockeys who are playing, say, “Cleveland’s rock” as they sit in a booth in Los Angeles, WKZV had its own individual character, a quality that is sorely lacking on today’s radio landscape.

It will be missed.