WPAQ, Voice of the Blue Ridge

Mount Airy, North Carolina is known as the boyhood home of Andy Griffith and also (quite naturally) the real town upon which the fictional TV town of Mayberry was modeled. For old-time music fans, it is also known as the home of WPAQ radio.

WPAQ first went on the air in 1948, the embodiment of a vision held by a young Ralph Epperson. Epperson was dedicated to promoting, encouraging and preserving the authentic music of the Blue Ridge mountain region. To that end he invited local musicians to come to the studio, where they would play live on the air -- while Epperson, often, was recording them for posterity.

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Ralph Epperson passed away a few years ago, but his heirs at WPAQ have hewed true to his original vision. This is an authentic country station, through and through. In addition to the bluegrass, old-time and gospel music, the announcers give the news, do charmingly less-than-slick commercials for local businesses, and even read out the obituaries.

The crown of the WPAQ lineup is undoubtedly "The Merry-Go-Round," a show of live music held each Saturday on the stage of a local theater. If you're ever in Mt. Airy on a Saturday, you can drop in and enjoy it in person, for free.

Although I currently live in North Carolina, I'm a little too far outside of WPAQ's broadcasting footprint to pick it up on a regular radio at its dial position of 740 AM. But thanks to Internet radio I can now listen to a WPAQ stream whenever I want.

By the way, if you have a standalone Internet radio device that uses the vTuner station database, you have me to thank for WPAQ's availability to you. Well, I can't really swear to that, but it's possible.

You see, I was disappointed to find, at the time I acquired my vTuner-based Internet radio (an Aluratek), that WPAQ was not in vTuner. Although Aluratk's version of vTuner does have a facility for adding your own streams to the radio, it's a little confusing and doesn't always work. Mainly this has to do with the variety of formats used for streaming radio -- some simply won't work in vTuner.

Long story short is that I finally gave up on adding the WPAQ stream to my radio. Instead I settled for requesting that the vTuner folks add it to their database for me, and of course for others who would enjoy this type of station. I didn't really expect that much would come of this request, but lo and behold, a couple of weeks later I was checking vTuner and there in its list of "new stations" was WPAQ!

Thank you, vTuner and Aluratek. And thank you, WPAQ, for keeping a great radio tradition alive.