Richard Winham was issued a special proclamation at his retirement benefit concert, declaring June 22 as “Richard Winham Day.” Photo by Angela Foster.
Richard Winham wants the world to know two things: Radio is not dead. Neither is Richard Winham.
“People keep saying radio is dead… but it doesn’t make any sense, because it’s not,” Winham said. “It’s as ubiquitous as it’s ever been.”
Trust him—he would know.
Winham joined WUTC-FM, the NPR-affiliated station housed on the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus, in 1987.
He has quietly become one of Chattanooga’s most familiar voices, not by chasing the spotlight, but as he put it, staying “on the edge of it.” After a long, successful career that includes launching the station’s first morning music show, curating daily music programming, producing live sessions with local and touring artists, and mentoring generations of students interested in broadcasting, Winham is retiring at the end of June.
“I don’t think of retirement as stopping,” he said. “It gives me a pause when people say, ‘Congratulations.’ I want to say, ‘That’s great, but please understand, I’m not dead.’
“An ideal life should expand and embrace. That’s how it works for me.”
To celebrate his many contributions to WUTC, the community came together for a public benefit concert on Sunday, June 22, at Barrelhouse Ballroom.
The show, which was also a fundraising event for WUTC, brought performances by some of Winham’s favorite local artists, including headliners The New Quintet and Randy Steele and the High Cold Wind. Guest performances included Wayne White and Username Password, Rick Rushing, Jhett Black, Swayyvo, Alex The Band, members of Strung Like A Horse, members of Call Me Spinster, Danimal, BEMI, Emily Kate Boyd and Nick Lutsko.
Among those honoring Winham’s legacy was WUTC producer and host Haley Solomon, whose entire radio journey began with him.
“I started as an intern in high school,” Solomon said, “and I just kept doing it throughout college. Then I went to UTC and I really enjoyed it, so I just kept doing it.”
When she was 17, she was invited to sit in on Winham’s live show. She told him about a website she followed that published monthly playlists of indie music. She would listen to all 150 songs each month and curate her favorites.
“Richard was like, ‘Well, I mean, that’s a radio show right there. That could be it. That works,’” she recalled.
He gave her a weekend slot, which eventually turned into her own Mocs Mix show—a student-hosted program on WUTC for UTC undergraduates.
“At one point, in its heyday, I think we had eight different Mocs Mix hosts on a week,” she said. “Richard was teaching all of the Mocs Mix students the same way he had taught me.”
Solomon, who graduated from UTC in 2018 with degrees in French and biology, continued to build her skills at the station, including mentoring other students and taking over Mocs Mix herself.
“I just really believe—and I think this idea was instilled in me by Richard—that almost anyone can be good at this,” she said. “They just need to care about something and be able to share that with others.”
With Winham stepping away, Solomon said it will be a challenge for the station to reimagine its identity without the person many listeners still associate most with WUTC.
“For so long, he was and is the identity of the station,” she said. “When people think of WUTC, they think of Richard … It’s hard to think about the station without Richard. Personally, just for my own journey, he’s always meant the station to me.”
She remains optimistic, along with the rest of the WUTC team.
“Now everyone on the team is fighting to connect with the community,” she said. “We are all doing what Richard started. We’re already on the path. We’ll carry his work, pick up the torch and keep running with it.
“I am energized and excited to keep moving forward and to keep doing more and making more opportunities for people to connect. I really think that’s all in the spirit of Richard, so I think he would be proud of us.”
At the benefit concert, Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly’s office issued a special proclamation declaring the date “Richard Winham Day” in recognition of his decades-long contributions to music, radio and community.
Richard Winham and Haley Solomon in the WUTC studio.
Winham’s journey in the radio world began in his hometown on the other side of the Atlantic. It wasn’t necessarily a love for it that drew him in, but rather a frustration with London broadcasting.
He recalled listening to a BBC morning show, which played only from 10 a.m. to noon on Sundays and was the closest thing to an America’s Top 40 station.
“How could people have missed it?” he asked. “It’s right there in front of you. This incredible music scene in London in the ’60s, both American and indigenous. The Stones, The Yardbirds and Eric Clapton.
“When the Beatles commanded the attention of the world in their home country, you can’t hear their music on the radio except for a couple of hours on the weekends.”
His real introduction to Top 40 radio came in 1964 courtesy of Radio London, an offshore radio station anchored in the North Sea.
“They started playing rock ’n’ roll music 24/7,” Winham said. “It’s like, ‘Damn, this is amazing.’”
In 1967, the station shut down due to a bill that made offshore radio illegal, leaving Winham without radio access to some of his favorite music once again.
Fortunately, BBC picked up Radio London and eventually added programming that matched Winham’s taste—including John Peel’s “Night of the Pirates” show.
“He started playing music he wanted to play,” Winham explained. “It was not the mainstream pop music that was hugely popular, but the stuff that wasn’t in the mainstream but was still for a lot of people. It was where the action was.”
Peel became a major inspiration for Winham—even becoming the topic of his dissertation as a doctoral student at UT Knoxville.
“When I came here, I just shamelessly imitated him and they thought it was really weird at first,” Winham said. “I think it’s true for most creatives, you start out by imitating someone else to find your own voice.”
Before Chattanooga, Winham left the United Kingdom for New York City. At 20 years old, he was in search of something different: a chance at a life away from home and a chance in radio.
He landed a weekend radio gig in Utica, New York, which was a six-hour train ride from his midtown apartment.
“There were so many times it could all have gone so completely wrong,” he said. “It was such a naive venture to come to America.
“I don’t know anybody, and I got a job that a lot of people want, especially in New York City. The apogee of commercial on non-commercial radio. To be on in New York is to be the big dog.”
After six months, the radio station closed, so Winham and the other employees were “tossed out on our ear.”
So, he followed a roommate—one of the few people he did know—to Chattanooga, where he found a job at WSIM. The station, which was located in nearby Red Bank, played just about everything except country music.
After a couple of years at WSIM, a change in station ownership and programming direction left Winham out of a job yet again.
“I came to think of radio and being out of work as synonymous at that point,” he said.
Richard Winham meets with guests at the retirement benefit concert at Barrelhouse Ballroom. Photo by Ray Soldano.
In the mid-1980s, Winham began at Chattanooga State Community College before transferring to UTC in 1987.
While working in the writing lab, he met someone who was leaving his job at WUTC and encouraged Winham to apply.
The “station” at that time was a single board in the basement of the Cadek Hall building, perched on a wooden trestle table with a neon light overhead and a bookshelf with about 50 albums.
“In no way did it feel like a job interview. I’m ready to sell myself … and he just seemed completely indifferent,” Winham recalled. “Two months later, he said, ‘Man, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Do you want to work here?’ I said, ‘Sure. That’s incredible.’”
His first on-air shifts were overnight.
“Who would do that?” he joked. “But then the other bloke who was on the alternate nights to me quit after about three months, so then I was on every night. I did that for about six months and then they gave me a gig on the weekends.”
In spring 1989, he made a case for why the station needed a morning host and ended up becoming it himself.
“If they like classical music, maybe they’ll listen, but probably not because there’s a station in Collegedale that’s been playing classical music for a long time,” he recalled telling his boss. “So, they’ve pretty much got that audience locked up.”
To his surprise, his boss agreed and assigned him as the host.
“Well, I know that wasn’t necessarily what I had in mind,” Winham said with a laugh.
Still, he did it. And it didn’t take long for him to become a trusted voice in thousands of Chattanoogans’ homes.
While many recognize him for his English accent, he said it’s the content that should matter most.
“People think it’s cool, so you don’t have to do anything. Just talk,” he explained. “Give me a break. Ignore how I say it and listen to what I’m saying.”
He also continued his studies, earning a bachelor’s degree from UTC in 1990 and a master’s degree in 1996.
Richard Winham records an episode of “The Thursday Encounter” with student intern Kinnawa Kaitibi in 2014. Photo courtesy of WUTC.
Winham is hesitant to use the phrase “music scene,” calling it “so corny … ’60s.” But over time, he said, the Chattanooga musical “landscape” has become broader and more diverse thanks in part to Nightfall and Live in the Library, which helped artists take themselves seriously.
“If you’re regularly saying to people listening, ‘These guys make music in Chattanooga. They’re now on the radio so you can listen to them too,’ then they start taking them more seriously,” he said.
Around the time his morning show began, Winham was invited to host the Chattanooga summer concert series “Nightfall.”
“Geez, I don’t know … I guess,” he said when asked. “Of course, I was bloody hopeless.”
Despite the rocky start, he stayed with Nightfall for about 15 years and was able to see how the city’s music culture grew around it.
In 2018, Winham helped launch “Live in the Library,” a weekly concert series recorded in a professional studio on the fourth floor of the downtown Chattanooga Public Library. The idea originated from a collaborator who had worked in the punk scene and wanted to bring something similar to NPR’s Tiny Desk to Chattanooga.
“She said, ‘I really want to do Tiny Desk concerts,’” Winham recalled, “and I said, ‘Man, so do I. Let’s do it.’”
Whether he was in the library, on a downtown Chattanooga stage or behind a microphone at WUTC, Winham’s mission was to create a space for others.
“That’s how I’ve always thought of radio,” he said. “They call it broadcasting, and broadcasting started on university campuses—agricultural campuses, actually. Broadcasting is spreading seeds.
“UTC has supported the station from the beginning, and that is an incredible gift to those of us working here and to the community … In the time I’ve worked at WUTC, the audience has been incredibly supportive.
“That term ‘listener supported’ speaks equally to people’s attitude toward this station. People embrace it. They make it part of their lives. It’s on in their cars; it’s on in the kitchen. And the people who listen come in here and talk to us as if we’re friends of theirs, which is really cool. That’s a really nice feeling.”
That connection to the audience shaped Winham’s approach to radio early on, encouraging him to be, as he described it, not the story—but the “teller.”
“Really, every day is the first day. Every day you start again,” he said. “If I have a guest and somebody said, ‘You treat all the guests the same way.’ It never occurred to me to do it any other way.”
His decades at UTC have included thousands of interviews: local artists, touring musicians, symphony conductors, poets. He welcomed student broadcasters whom he recognized could be the next generation of radio.
“I told a friend of mine, I think I have a guardian angel,” he said, recalling his move to New York. “It is a truism that you can’t get there if you don’t know where you’re going. That was really the only thing I had on my side. I knew where I was going.”
Winham said that he has noticed many college students in their junior and senior years get frightened by their dreams and future endeavors.
“All of a sudden, they’re facing a harsh reality that their dreams are not going to be that easy to realize, and there’s a good possibility they won’t realize them,” he said.
“But I’ve always told people, ‘The only reason you won’t realize those dreams is because you didn’t realize nobody is stopping you. Nobody can stop you. If you want something that badly, you just act like a twit like me and take a cheap flight 3,000 miles away.’”
Richard Winham in the Cadek Hall studio. Photo courtesy of WUTC.
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Photo gallery by Angela Foster
