R.I.P.: James 'Moby' Carney, Former Altanta Country Radio Personality

James 'Moby' Carney (1964-2023)

James “Moby” Carney, a popular Atlanta country music radio morning host in the 1990s and 2000s, died Wednesday at age 69 after a battle with cancer, his family announced.

The long-time Roswell resident and inductee into the Country Radio Hall of Fame and the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame was a dominant force on Kicks 101.5 (WKHX-FM) from 1991 to 2012, according to ajc.com.

“He was the hardest working DJ you’d ever meet,” said Deborah Richards, his long-time newswoman at Kicks. “He lived, drank, ate and slept that show. He was laser-focused.”

She said Moby never talked down to his audience. “We used to call our listeners the neighbors,” she said. “Moby was your neighbor. He spoke with them from humble beginnings.”

Moby was in radio for more than 40 years, going back to his small hometown of Crossville, Tennessee, with blue-collar parents. He picked up the nickname Moby when he was 12 when he almost drowned in a lake and someone said he looked like Moby Dick splashing around in the water.

At 15, he landed his first radio job at WCSV-AM in Crossville playing Sunday morning gospel music for $1.60 per hour. He attended Belmont College — now Belmont University — in Nashville after high school and planned to major in music education. But partway through, he quit and went into radio full time.

Before coming to Atlanta, he worked at stations in Nashville, Tampa, Dallas and Houston, where he became a popular rock jock in the 1980s.

Steve Mitchell, his producer at the time and a long-time friend, said he was immediately impressed with Moby’s outsized personality when Moby arrived in 1991. “He was country sounding but he was unconventional for a country radio station at that time,” Mitchell said.

Richards said the rise of the rock and pop leanings of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain in the 1990s matched Moby’s style.

His Kicks coworkers marveled over how well prepared Moby was every morning. “He would spend his afternoons going over material,” Mitchell said. “He’d find articles and cut and paste them onto pieces of paper. He’d staple them together and bring them into the studio.”

Moby’s departure from Kicks was marked with controversy after the program director Dene Hallam let him go in 2012, explaining that Moby’s schtick didn’t connect with the suburban housewife they were chasing.

After Moby left Kicks, he worked briefly at Z93 (WZGC-FM), a rock station at the time, as a morning host. It wasn’t working,  Moby in 2004 built a studio in Roswell and started his own syndicated show which he ran until 2016. It heard on several small country stations in Georgia and some nearby states. His slogan: “The biggest small town in America!”