DC Bluegrass Union

WAMU 88.5’s Ray Davis Celebrates 60 Years on the Air

Washington's Ray Davis, host of The Ray Davis Show on WAMU’s Bluegrass Country, celebrates 60 years in broadcasting on May 2.

Ray Davis joined WAMU 88.5 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, Md., for a job at WDOV-AM in Dover, Del. He had jobs at other small town stations around the country, as well as a stint south of the border at XERF, the Mexican mail-order station that made Wolfman Jack famous, where he learned to be a radio pitchman. Davis returned to the east coast and spent 38 years hosting a popular bluegrass program from Johnny's Used Cars for WBMD in Baltimore, Md. In 1962, he began recording some of the nation’s finest bluegrass musicians and selling these recordings under his own label, Wango.

Davis hosts bluegrass festivals and concerts around the country, including the Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival, and the Arcadia Music Festival. He also produces 15 hours of bluegrass music each week for WAMU’s Bluegrass Country. When he’s not acting as program host or concert emcee, chances are Davis is holed up in his basement studio producing CDs from hundreds of bluegrass tapes he’s recorded over the years. Since the 1960s, Davis has been enlisting friends like Carter and Ralph Stanley, Don Reno, Bill Harrell, the Warrior River Boys, the Gillis Brothers, Owen Saunders, and a host of others to make his so-called "basement tapes." The basement tapes include previously unreleased jam sessions with many of these legendary bluegrass artists.

American University’s radio station since 1961, WAMU 88.5 is the leading public radio station for NPR news and information in the greater Washington, D.C., area with more than 650,000 listeners in the region. WAMU 88.5 is "your NPR news station in the nation’s capital."