Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber

Representation?

There is much to be said about any one of these live session series and what they contribute to imaginaries of South-Central Indiana by showcasing a range of artists within and beyond local and regional music scenes. Local Live and Saturday’s Child both focus on featuring artists in the terrestrial listening area. Saturday’s Child is curated by volunteer producers, while Local Live is more open and solicits submissions from any act interested in participating. At the time of this writing, recent Saturday’s Child artists have included the VLF Trio (“bluesy country funk”), Pangaea Sky (“jazz musicians… [who] explore the traditional and contemporary global music scene”), JammShack (a “newly formed rock trio”), Timothy J W Baker (a “veteran of the Bloomington folk scene”), C. Daniel Boling (a “Kerrville New Folk award winning songwriter”) and Sumatics (“R&B-influenced sound from an extraordinarily talented and renowned electronic duo”). Recent Local Live artists have included, among others, Jon Manners (“singer-songwriter”), Jeff Cannon (debuting “songs from his rock musical”), Real Peak (“a dreamgroove band”), King Bee and the Stingers (a “Bloomington all-star band”), Lenox Monroe (a “shimmering alt pop artist”), Rearview Rhonda (“garage rock”), and Roy Major (a “lifelong musician”).[1] In some regards, there is range represented here; each of these lists alone includes younger and older artists with different relationships to the area; some are born-and-raised Bloomingtonians, others came here as students, and still others are transplants to the area for different reasons altogether. There is a range of musical styles at hand, as the bracketed descriptions indicate. There are also many demographic similarities between these artists: they are predominantly white, apparently natively Anglophone, U.S. Americans. Federal census data collected in 2024 estimates Bloomington’s population as being 86.2% white, so this is perhaps unsurprising. What, though, do these live sessions contribute to the whole WFHB soundscape?

In pursuing goals of celebrating and increasing local diversity, WFHB specifically produces numerous programs especially targeted at inclusion of groups outside a white, Anglophone, U.S. American, cisheteronormative, neurotypical, non-disabled perceived default. Some examples of locally produced news and public affairs programs listed on the WFHB site:

• Autism Rocks and Rolls: You’re listening to Autism Rocks and Rolls with Sam Mitchell on WFHB—a program that advocates for better awareness and acceptance of autism.

• bloomingOUT: BloomingOUT is one of the nation’s longest-running LGBTIQ focused radio shows. We feature people, news, events, entertainment, and businesses relevant to the queer experience in central Indiana and the Midwest. Tune in each week or stream anytime you like to hear conversations and interviews across the diverse spectrum of our community.

• Bring It On!: Bring It On! is Indiana’s only weekly radio program committed to exploring the people, issues and events impacting the African-American community.

• Disabulletin:[2] Disabulletin covers the top stories impacting the disability community across the country and around the world.

• Hearabouts:[3] Hearabouts is produced at WFHB in Bloomington, Indiana, in partnership with the Indiana University Asian Culture Center. Hearabouts: Asian American Midwest Radio seeks to provide a forum for Asians and Asian Americans to discuss issues surrounding race, ethnicity, art, culture, history, current events, and lived experience.

• Hola Bloomington: Hola Bloomington is a Spanish speaking radio program featuring news, entertainment and public opinion.

(WFHB n.d.)

While most music programming is less overtly didactic, the program SONIC BLACKNUSS RADIO stands as an important musical intervention against the idea of Bloomington as fundamentally white. Hosted and curated by ethnomusicologist Nia I’man Smith, who goes by the name of DJ Ann Charles a.k.a. The Black Connection on air, SONIC BLACKNUSS RADIO is described on the WFHB website as “a biweekly curation of Black music across time and space. Spinning jazz, soul, R&B, funk, blues, and more, each episode features a theme that sounds the intersection between Black music, history, culture, and memory” (ibid.). Smith plans each episode around a theme that allows her to curate music and offer information. Some of these themes have been explicitly related to Smith’s academic work. Smith has dedicated episodes to foundational Black music researchers Dr. Olly Wilson, Dr. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., and Dr. Eileen Southern. She has also invited scholarly guests. The episode “Sounding Soul” featured Black music scholar Dr. Olivia Ekeh, then a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor at Indiana University. “All Blues” featured fellow radio host and ethnomusicologist Lamont Jack Pearley. Still other episodes are centered around moods (“The Lovers Only Hour”), musicians (Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Andy Bey, and D’Angelo all have their own tribute episodes), intertwined personal-ancestral memories (“2563 Wallace St.,” “Places and Spaces I’ve Been,” “Dear Momma”), and an array of other concepts. SONIC BLACKNUSS RADIO did not begin on WFHB; Smith initially produced it as a podcast in association with Brooklyn Free Speech Radio (The Black Connection, n.d.). For as long as it remains part of the WFHB schedule, its presence in the South-Central Indiana ether contributes to a performative counter-cartography of the region by dedicating time and thought to Black voices and expressions. So, too, do the aforementioned news and public affairs shows.

Each of these productions contributes to the work WFHB volunteers do toward fulfilling the station’s mission statement. At the time of this writing, though, the programs I have listed in the last paragraph only add up to an average of 4.5 hours of WFHB’s broadcasting week—less than 3%. Certainly, this does not preclude the possibility of other programming on the schedule also serving minoritized communities in the local area. It is, though, worth interrogating the extent to which WFHB’s programming choices reify the idea of U.S. American whiteness as central to South-Central Indiana identity through curation and framing of live performers.

Much has been said and written about race in non-commercial broadcasting in the United States. Laura Garbes describes “the public radio industry in the United States as a white institutional space… mirroring the comforts and tastes of predominantly white, professional-class listener-members” (2025, 6). Community radio is harder to generalize about, given its grassroots nature and differences between operational contexts. Case studies like Lei Guo’s research at Texas-based community stations KOOP in Austin and KPFT in Houston, though, have presented findings in keeping with those in public radio. With survey data, Guo finds that regular listeners of both stations are predominantly “well-educated White men” and notes that “while both stations strive to serve diverse, underrepresented communities and create mutual understanding, it is ironic to find that the ‘mainstream’ community members represent the majority of its listenership” (2017, 119). I have not conducted listener surveys like Guo’s, nor do I think they would tell the entire story of WFHB’s audiences, many of whom likely tune in and out throughout their days and who might never hear an on-air solicitation for survey respondents or come into online contact with such a survey on their own. That the artists who participate in Saturday’s Child and Local Live are predominantly white Anglophone U.S. Americans, though, indicates something, perhaps about WFHB’s listenership and perhaps about Bloomington’s music scenes, both of which reflect the town’s demographic makeup according to census data. One radio colleague commented on this to me during an interview in response to me asking for a characterization of the sounds of WFHB:

It sounds white to me. So I would characterize it as that. I think Bloomington generally is a super white place… There’s not a station like [“urban radio” stations] in Bloomington, and WFHB doesn’t fill that void, necessarily. So I think sort of by default, it’s pretty white music… a lot of Americana, which isn’t naturally my speed… if I was going to paint an image of it, I think a lot of it would be that. But that’s not the part that I love or want. I think it’s the smaller pieces of the pie that I’m really stoked and proud about… I think that the variety of it is the strong suit. And I don’t think that it’s necessarily weak because it sounds so white, it’s just kind of a product of the space. (Interview 19)

In pointing directly to social-sonic-spatial factors, my colleague here directly cited certain dominant imaginaries of Bloomington that do, indeed, echo on WFHB’s airwaves, whether in everyday programming practices or these live session series. Certainly, there is racial/linguistic/national/ethnic diversity among the artists whose sounds comprise WFHB’s programming, but it is true that it is often separated into specific performance contexts—Planetary Caravan, for example, or the Lotus Live series. I have explored a small number of examples of Planetary Caravan already in this chapter that demonstrate the potentials and limitations of programming that can take place in these categories.[4] In the next section, I turn to a discussion of Lotus Live to understand the specific affordances (and, again, limitations) of live radio performance for challenging a fixed map of Bloomington and instead expanding its capabilities for resonance.

[1] All descriptors in parentheses for Saturday’s Child and Local Live artists come from posts about each session on the WFHB website (https://wfhb.org/category/music/live-sessions/) except for information about Jeff Cannon, whose descriptor comes from a post on WFHB’s official Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/wfhb/).

[2] Disabulletin ran from 2022-2024, at which time its creator and producer, Abe Shapiro, moved out of state.

[3] Beginning in 2025, one of the producers of Hearabouts was Dr. Suyash Kumar Neupane, a graduate of Indiana’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.

[4] Though John’s Planetary Caravan shows highlight Nordic artists, other Planetary Caravan hosts spin very different shows. Some have historically had specific geographic areas of interest. Others put together shows that are more eclectic, comparable to weekday mixes. Each Planetary Caravan programmer’s selections suggest different combinations of potentials and limitations, just as every WFHB programmer’s selections do in general. A fully comprehensive survey of such is far outside the scope of this dissertation and perhaps any single study.