Nashville Radio: Bobby Bones Admits He Paid For Billboards

Back in early 2014, billboards stating “Go Away Bobby Bones” in big bold letters appeared on the Nashville scene.

Now, according to The Tennessean, Bones unapologetically admits in his new book “Bare Bones: I’m Not Lonely if You’re Reading This Book” that he paid for them himself. The cost? About $13,000.

“Everyone who considered himself a real defender of country music hated me,” Bones writes. “My attitude was, ‘This is how it’s going to work. I’m playing whatever I want to play. I’m doing the bits I want to do. I don’t wear cowboy boots or hats or belt buckles. I am not you; I am me.”

The Washington Post reports while Bones writes now he probably could have handled the transition better, at the time, he was determined to not change. But a year into his run, he was getting tired of being known as “the weird radio guy.” “My attitude wasn’t winning me any friends — or listeners. I needed to get people to like me, or at least feel sorry for me,” he writes.

Bobby Bones

“Working on the theory that it’s hard to hate someone if he is getting picked on, I thought, I’m going to turn myself into the one who is getting picked on,” he explained.

Sure enough, the phones started ringing: From listeners, his bosses and media outlets. The main response: “Dude, I can’t believe people are doing that to you.” Bones writes that people started wildly speculating who it could be, from record labels to other radio stations to country singers who didn’t like him. When media outlets (and even his own company) tried to investigate, they found the billboards were purchased by an organization called “Anti-BOBBY BONES.”

At the time, Bones was about one year into his run as the morning country radio show host on WSIX 97.9 FM The Big 98  in Nashville. His show, "The Bobby Bones Show," was broadcast on many iHeartMedia radio stations across the country and his style was hard-edged and crass — not typical for country radio. Locally he was seen as the successor to the beloved Gerry House — a comparison that wore on him.

Initially, Bones, previously a Top 40 radio personality, was unwilling to compromise his approach to country radio. He credited the wide-reaching dislike of him to “change rage.” Now he describes himself back then as “a bull in a china shop” and admits “no wonder everybody hated my guts.”


At the time the billboards were put up, there was much discussion in Nashville about who paid for them — was it a record label that didn’t appreciate his style, an artist he had offended? Today he knows the negative campaign he waged against himself worked.