Imagine Jocks Picking Their Own Music

It’s 11:30 on a weekday morning at the WDVX studio, and DJ Grace, aka Grace Toensing, is running around like a jitterbug, in and out of the studio and the adjacent storage room, pulling faxes and choosing CDs, answering phones while an especially lengthy music selection keeps the airwaves full.

David Luttrell photo

“I swear I think that woman called me ‘sir’,” she laughs. Toensing is one of those people who brings to her job a very real and singular enthusiasm, an effervescent joi de vivre that seems to defy proscriptions against perpetual motion.

Mike Gibson at metropulse.com writes that sort of indefatigable spirit is useful at WDVX, licensed to Clinton, TN and serving the Knoxville market, an Americana station with the almost unheard-of policy—in today’s era—of allowing its DJs to operate with no playlist, pulling songs track by track from a wall of CDs in the abutting room. With no computer bank to fall back on, there’s an awful lot of to-and-fro going on.

But Toensing wasn’t always a DJ dynamo. Upon first coming to WDVX some 15 years ago, she says, “I didn’t know Bill Monroe from a hole in the ground.”

She was also scared stiff at the prospect of saying more that a few words at a time on the air. “You could have wrote down everything I said,” says Toensing. “But I fell in love with the place,” Toensing say. “It’s been more fun than you can shake a stick at. It’s been a blessing to be part of it all.”

Like Toensing, WDVX has persevered. In 2011, the station won its seventh Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music Association award for Bluegrass Station of the Year. Having begun webcasting in the late 1990s, it has pockets of fans in unexpected places the world over. And it’s been featured on ABC’s World News, PBS NewsHour, the BBC, No Depression, and in a slew of other domestic and foreign outlets.

And now it’s celebrating its unlikely 15th anniversary, with a Nov. 9 concert at the Bijou Theatre featuring Buddy Miller, Jim Lauderdale, the Shawn Camp Band, Jay Clark, Robinella, and the Naughty Knots.

But when station svengali and program director Tony Lawson accounts for that 15 years, he starts when WDVX took to its first “permanent” digs—the infamous Anderson County camper where the station took root in 1997 and remained until 2005, when it moved to the Knoxville Visitor Center on Gay Street. “Nov. 5 and the camper—I consider that our real birthday,” he says.

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