WNOX - History - AM Station

AM Station

For years, the WNOX call letters belonged to the frequency AM 990. In November 1921, WNOX signed on the air as WNAV, the first radio station in Tennessee and one of the ten oldest in the country, and was licensed to broadcast at 833 kHz. In 1923, the station's initial owner, the First Baptist Church of Knoxville, sold it to the People's Telephone & Telegraph Company. Sterchi Brothers Furniture briefly owned the station before it was again sold to Scripps-Howard in 1935. The early WNAV studios were located in the St. James Hotel, which once stood near the head of Market Square. Within the span of its first 19 years, the station's call letters changed to WNOX, and the station frequency changed many times, eventually settling at AM 990 in March 1941.

After its purchase by Scripps-Howard, the station moved to the Andrew Johnson Hotel on Gay Street, with its main offices located on the hotel's 17th floor. The station's growing studio audiences began causing elevator traffic issues for the Andrew Johnson, however, and the hotel asked the station to move. WNOX relocated to a small tabernacle building at the north end of Gay Street, where it remained for several years.

In the 1950s and 1960s, WNOX was home to the popular lunchtime program The Midday Merry-go-Round and weekend program The Tennessee Barndance, which were both influential in the early days of country music. Legendary station manager Lowell Blanchard hosted the programs for many years in downtown Knoxville, and lunch crowds packed the station's downtown auditorium to see the daily programs. Seeking a bigger performance area, WNOX moved its studios to Whittle Springs Road in north Knoxville. The Whittle Springs facility included a large auditorium for live performances, but after the move from downtown, the live musical performances were never the same. Once the crowds diminished, the live performances were called off.

The owners of WNOX also had other, much bigger plans for their new facility on Whittle Springs Road. In 1955, Scripps-Howard Broadcasting was one of the applicants for the Channel 10 frequency, awarded to Knoxville after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reorganized its U.S. TV table of channel allocations in 1952. So sure of getting the Channel 10 license, the company poured thousands of dollars into the Whittle Springs building to make it a top-notch radio-TV studio combination. After the FCC awarded the TV license to Jay Birdwell, local owner of WBIR AM and FM in 1956, Scripps-Howard was saddled with a huge studio to ultimately be used just for radio, amid a dwindling live listening audience. Still, the station remained there for many years, less than two miles from its transmitter site.

The 1960s brought a new era for WNOX. The station became a popular Top 40 station, and remained that way until the late 1970s, when the station switched to AC. In the early 1980s, the station was bought again and flipped to country, and WNOX was never the same.

WNOX's legendary call letters were changed to WTNZ in 1988. However, within a few months Dick Broadcasting (WIVK) purchased WTNZ-AM 990. Dick donated AM 850, its old daytime-only frequency, to the University of Tennessee, and the 990 frequency, which could air nighttime programming, quickly became WIVK-AM and began airing the programming of WIVK-FM. Within a few years, WIVK-AM began experimenting with news/talk programming, eventually phasing into a news/talk format 24/7.