[Times photo — Michael Weimar] Jerry Trail, “Trail Boss” to Saturday listeners of WDJY radio, starts his on-air mornings at 6 and doesn’t stop broadcasting for 10 hours.

Retro radio

In three of Florida's most rural counties, it's country radio deja vu: 10 hours of picking, jawing and swapping.

By STEVE PERSALL

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 3, 2000

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TRENTON -- Another Saturday sunrise, and a turn of a radio dial brings sounds of Florida living the way it used to be, in a place where it hasn't changed.

WDJY-FM, a 6,000-watt time warp, is on the air.

In a pasture, inside a dented trailer hitched to a 469-foot antenna, Jerry Trail, a.k.a. the Trail Boss, begins a 10-hour broadcast shift by hosting Ghost Riders Club. He greets the club's 102 members by name, some with nicknames of their own: "Mornin', Snakehandler. Mornin', Skeeter."

Counting chit-chat, it takes 33 minutes to get to the first song.

That list of devoted listeners is all he knows about his ratings, since WDJY (101.7) doesn't subscribe to the Arbitron numbers.

The club anthem plays: Duane Eddy's cowboy myth Ghost Riders in the Sky, one of 54 versions Trail owns. This collection is rivaled only by his batch of country songs about chickens. He'll sneak a few of each into the day's playlist.

During the show, club members call in with greetings of their own. Miss Bessie informs everyone that she is, indeed, feeling better now. Skeeter dials in and wins a free oil change.

One Ghost Rider reports that the Cracker Barrel is so busy she lost her favorite parking space. Another reminds Trail that the first hunter posting a kill photo on the "braggin' board" at her store wins a weekly prize.

A few fans visit in person: a man with a spotted pup and a .357-caliber Magnum on his front seat, a fellow with breakfast whisky on his breath, and septuagenarians Howard and Erma Bennett, married 56 years with 11 children, 31 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren (and two more on the way).

The youngest ones may grow up and leave this tri-county region of Gilchrist, Dixie and Levy counties, among the poorest in Florida. Older residents like the Bennetts are firmly rooted, content to let the world turn more quickly someplace else.

Those are the folks Trail Boss and his co-hosts -- Linwood "Sharecropper" Koonce and Bennie "Tumbleweed" Thomas -- aim to please. Anyone else listening, they reckon, is just temporarily smart.

The day's programming will be as follows: three hours of Ghost Riders chat and music, three hours of a telephone Swap Shop, and four hours of The Pot Luck Show, a grand jumble of antique country music and the occasional novelty song.

None of it would be recognizable to urban radio listeners. WDJY has no slick edits or recorded jingles. No seven-second delay button to weed out dull callers. No trained voices or planned shtick. Trail reads cornpone commercials for used cars, roadside produce markets and garages -- if someone reminds him.

[Times photo — Michael Weimar] Located in a rural area of Gilchrist County just outside Trenton, the studios of WDJY radio host the weekly Ghost Riders Club, where vintage country music and down-home folksiness rule the airwaves.

WDJY's country music format goes retro every Saturday -- underground entertainment simply because that's where everything old-fashioned usually gets driven. The shows come from a place where Grandma is more important than grammar, and you can usually believe commercials promising service with a smile.

Call it Mayberry radio, a comparison Koonce gladly accepts:

"They had one (Andy Griffith) show in particular when Aunt Bee had written a nice song called My Hometown and gave it to an artist who wanted to rockabilly it.

"Aunt Bee said, "No, no, no, you're going to play it my way.' And it was a hit. So, that's what we do up here: We play it our way."

On a channel billing itself as "Your Hometown Radio Station."

Midway through Ghost Riders Club, Trail punches a button on a CD player that looks as if it ought to be dumped later on Swap Shop.

What Kind of Fool Do You Think I Am?, by the Tams, is a strange follow-up to Hank Snow singing about everywhere he has been and to the Carter Family's Wildwood Flower.

The Tams aren't country, a visitor blurts out.

"It's more country than what they call country today," Trail says, sounding as if it's his last word on the subject. It rarely stays that way.

"There's some good newer songs out there, but it's just best to stay out of them woods," he adds. "I like some of all of it, but not all of any of it."

Trail, 57, claims he couldn't pick Faith Hill out of a one-woman lineup. He's strictly an oldies kind of guy, preferring Fats Domino to Garth Brooks, and Hank Williams -- senior, not junior -- to most anybody. New country is brushed off as "hip-hop."

Trail prefers music from times when country wasn't cool.

"How come a circus can get away with being a circus?" Trail asks, then answers: "It never changes, but everybody ain't ever seen a circus. They ain't heard a lot of these songs, either."

Saturday is the only day Trail can be heard on WDJY and its simulcast on WDFL-AM (1240). The other six days, he works as the stations' advertising manager. The shows make him known to clients, and fans believe him when he says Country Kwik Stop has the best fried chicken he ever "et." Celebrity works, even here.

"These businesses in these towns are sort of clique-ish," Trail explains. "They don't bite just any old worm. Sometimes, it's like pushing a rope."

Trail is stubborn enough to try that. His first day on the airwaves, babysitting the dials at a Chiefland station in 1996, Trail played 37 consecutive minutes of Orange Blossom Special. Just because. Nobody complained.

During his first show at WDJY in August, Trail showed his loopy musical range by playing Aram Khachaturian's classical Saber Dance. A flustered station executive burst into the studio.

"He told me if he was my boss, he would fire my blank right then and there," Trail says. I said, "The fact is you ain't, so what's the problem? If I want to, I'll get five versions of Saber Dance and play 'em back-to-back. I'll play the Bee Gees if I want to.' "

[Times photo — Michael Weimar] Searching through his extensive collection of country music CDs, Linwood Koonce, known to his audience as “Sharecropper,” prepares for the Pot Luck Radio segment of WDJY’s Saturday lineup.

Trail and Koonce do have some disco stashed among the 750 compact discs they tote into the trailer each Saturday. They created many of the CDs at Koonce's home with a CD burner and a pile of classic vinyl records.

Practically everyone from the Grand Ole Opry's heyday is included, referenced for easy access when Trail Boss gets on one of his "mega-mega sack full of songs" tears.

Macho movie themes such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Zulu are personal favorites. On this day, he'll play part of a Donna Summer moaner with Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry monologue in the background. A caller's name -- say, Linda -- can inspire an impromptu theme with five or six tunes about Lindas.

How complete is their music collection?

"Me and him together can play 99 percent of the requests," Trail says, "if we feel like it."

They dip into the archives for today's Ghost Rider Showdown, a duel between two of those 54 versions of Ghost Riders in the Sky. Walter Brennan easily defeats Scatman Crothers, winning a telephone survey 17-3. Voters talk idly when they get on the air, because when The Pot Luck Show rolls around, there isn't time for much except music.

First, however, there's business to conduct.

"I'd like to buy a Ford pickup truck, short-bed, between 1975 and 1985," a female Swap Shopper says, forgetting the most important detail:

"Oh, yeah. Without a motor."

No one offers or asks for any explanation. It's just another deal for Sharecropper to jot on a yellow legal pad. These are classified ads of sorts for a tri-county yard sale broadcast live by buddies. Telephone numbers, personal details and addresses are given without worrying about crank calls or worse.

Vehicles with motors are also available. So are parts for items that churn, pressurize or pump. Need a chicken that lays colored eggs? A 400-pound boar hog? A show pig? Call right away. Who needs eBay?

Furniture is cheap and kittens are free. Same as the small talk Trail can't resist.

One caller touting roadside shrimp offers advice on how to buy.

"You buy a pound with the heads for $8.95, and it works out to about $13.07 with the extra you can't use," he claims. "I've got 'em headless for $8.95."

Nobody will starve today. A woman calls to invite everyone to a free "pig pickin' " with all the trimmings, sponsored by a local church. Another calls to praise a restaurant's clam chowder. Trail adds to the menu with a typically informal ad for R.P. Tedder's Produce Market:

"He's got 'taters, 'maters and tires. No, he ain't got no tires, I don't reckon. R.P., you got any tires down there? He'd probably sell you them tires off that trailer, his little store there. He won't need them tires for a while.

"What impresses me most is he's got the biggest avocados I have ever seen. They look like bullfrog heads. Big, big green things. He had him some greens this morning, said it would be a couple of weeks before he had some more, but you never know. Somebody might come by and sell him some to re-sell to you."

The talk on Swap Shop is polite, with sir-and-ma'am respect and not a whiff of innuendo. Hee-Haw was racier than this.

"You've got to control stuff like that," Trail says off the air. "People be standing in line at Wal-Mart, talking like they're in a John Travolta movie. We just don't do it, not in real life and no other place. There's a place for that kind of stuff, and it ain't on the streets or on the air."

A few seconds later, the telephone rings. It's R.P Tedder. No, he won't sell his tires, but, yes, he has avocados today.

At 12:02 p.m., someone calls, asking for the Swap Shop line. It's the only time Trail gets testy with a caller.

"Swap Shop's over at noon," he snaps. "This is Pot Luck, an oldies show. You got a song you want to hear? No? Bye."

For the next four hours, WDJY turns into a jukebox of country music memories, from outlaws letting down Mama to spurned lovers in honky-tonk homes until closing time. The show is a primer in Nashville history, presenting artists radio forgot long ago:

Roy Acuff. Bob Wills. Ernest Tubb. Marty Robbins. Even flashes in the pan like Susan Ray. Trail Boss gets an idea, and Sharecropper finds the disc. Callers attempt, usually in vain, to name a tune they don't have. They don't get many chances to try. Pouring on the music is Trail Boss' plan, sometimes as many as 32 songs in a row without a break.

"That's what happens when you get carried away," he says, neglecting the ads he sold for the station.

"We're about to kick off now," Trail announces to his partners. "We're going to the top of the hour with nothing but hubcap-spinning music."

Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Breakdown is an appropriate start. Phone lines fall silent after an initial rush of requests. Nobody seems to want to miss a note. You envision three counties' residents tapping their feet at the same time. Or smiling in unison, at the very least.

Florida's past fades to static somewhere near Crystal River's nuclear power plant. Southbound motorists can only hope it doesn't happen until this song or that conversation ends.

It's tempting to turn around to hear the rest of the show. But it isn't likely you'll do it because there's always someplace else you're supposed to be when you're anywhere except in the country. Turning around isn't much of an option for city folks anymore.

At day's end, Trail sneaks in encores of Johnny Cash's The Chicken in Black and George Jones whining Have You Seen My Chicken? Zulu, too. Nobody correctly answered Sharecropper's trivia question about Buck Owens' dead former bandmate.

Callers praise the day's efforts, saying the gang "out-done" themselves today.

Off the air, Trail wonders about tomorrow.

"This is the last place you can get your lost dog (announcement) on the radio," he says solemnly. "It's a hometown radio station today, but it won't be for long."

WDJY was sold in September to Pamal Broadcasting, "one of those conglomerates," and Trail doesn't know how, or if, he fits into the plans. He expects the new owners to hire a sales staff and polished disc jockeys, with Dwight Yoakam marking as far back as the memories will go.

"They may let me come in here on Saturdays and shuck the corn a little bit," he says, "but I don't think so."

Two new Ghost Riders who joined today will be disappointed if they don't.

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