Bruce Hornsby "Rainbow's Cadillac"

My first radio gig was at an AM/FM combo station.

One little independent business, with two studios.

Truthfully, through large portions of the week the AM simulcast the FM, so whatever you heard on one, you hear on the other.

But there were a few exceptions. The AM station carried a live Jazz show that wasn’t on the FM. And the AM was the local home of the Virginia Tech Hokies.

But the most marked difference between the two channels was on Sunday morning, when the preachers came.

I think, if you grow up Catholic, you are accustomed to a religious style that is ordered, predictable, emotionally a bit muted.

And if you grow up in the North, your view of the Southern preacher is likely based on TV caricature.

So it was an education for me, to sit in as I did from time to time, and host the Sunday morning programming on the AM side.

Lord knows that I was pretty ignorant about Gospel music. So someone would have to pick out songs for me ahead of time.

But the real job of that shift, was to shuttle the Preachers in and out of their time slots.

Not unlike how the station would sell commercials, they would also sell blocks of time to the various area Baptist ministers, who’d come in every Sunday morning, to deliver the Word of God (as they saw it).

It could be real fire-and-brimstone stuff, and often, the preacher was overcome with the spirit to the point that he became unintelligible.

You had fiery guys like that, but you also had these weird, monotone, slightly-angry-yet-laconic-zombie deliveries. Those were the guys that gave me the creeps.

Meanwhile, on the FM side of the station, we’d play this Bruce Hornsby track, about a colorful, charismatic preacher and I’d wonder if they had different preachers where Bruce lived (at the other end of the same state).

These guys were the closest thing to monochromatic human beings I’d ever met.