When WAMU’s Ray Davis notched his 60th year in radio broadcasting, Richard Thompson put together a nice career retrospective for us here on The Bluegrass Blog.

This past week, Ray was celebrated with a profile in Radio World, an influential trade journal for the broadcast radio industry. The article by Ken Deutsch follows Ray from the time he left his home in Maryland to take a radio job in Delaware, to his current position with WAMU’s Bluegrass Country doing five live bluegrass shows each week.

There is a classic photo of Ray from 1951, and some wonderful stories about his early days in radio.

“I sold every kind of product on the air,” said Davis. “You had to ad-lib copy back then and you could tell if you were doing OK by how many orders came in.

“They had a mailroom in Del Rio, Texas, where I lived. It was huge. I’d drive across the border every day to work at the station, which was in this compound with armed guards. One night when I was leaving, I found a scorpion in my car.”

Long before Ronco’s Vegamatic, Davis had his own unique items to peddle.

“The weirdest thing I ever pitched on the air was something called the ‘Walk-Away,’” he said. “That was a concoction that claimed to cure rheumatism or something. I said on the air that it was made from the sands of the testing grounds of the atomic bomb. That product was only on for a few days.”

Read the full article online at www.radioworld.com.

The Weekend Edition of NPR News’ All Things Considered, airing this evening (Saturday, May 3rd), will feature an interview with Ray Davis, who has just marked his 60th year of radio broadcasting.

The program airs live from 5 to 6pm. (ET); local stations and broadcast times are available here: www.NPR.org/stations.

The audio from the show will be posted online after the show airs, on the All Things Considered web site.

Ray Davis, currently host of The Ray Davis Show on WAMU’s Bluegrass Country, celebrates 60 years in broadcasting today (May 2).

Davis joined WAMU in 1985 to host Saturday Bluegrass, and shared hosting duties for the weekday afternoon program, Bluegrass Country, until 2001. He currently hosts three live hours of traditional bluegrass music on The Ray Davis Show at 3 p.m., weekdays, and 10 a.m., Sundays, on WAMU’s Bluegrass Country, heard in Washington, D.C., in HD Radio at 88.5, Channel 2, and online at bluegrasscountry.org.

Davis provides area bluegrass fans and online listeners worldwide with a daily dose of the traditional American art form, from prison songs and “plum pitiful” tunes to the great train rides – and train wrecks – of bluegrass music, all delivered with Davis’ encyclopedic knowledge of the artists and the music. More than a DJ, Ray Davis is both a musicologist and an archivist who takes listeners on a stroll down bluegrass music’s memory lane. His specialties, the plum pitiful tunes, are tearjerkers that explore universal themes of death, betrayal, and jealousy.

“Ray Davis is a legend in music broadcasting. He has helped define bluegrass music on-air since its earliest days as a discrete genre, and has placed a lasting imprint on it with his dedication to playing, promoting, and recording its musicians”, said Caryn G. Mathes, WAMU 88.5’s General Manager. “His booming, resonant voice is synonymous with the sound of bluegrass at WAMU, and his willingness to explore broadcasting on multiple new media platforms as radio evolves has been an inspiration to me.”

Davis began his radio career at the age of 15, when he left his boyhood home in Wango, Maryland., for a job at WDOV-AM in Dover, Delaware. (more…)