Shownotes
Join us as we dive deep into the eclectic world of independent music with the one and only Nelson Gullett from WDVX in Knoxville, Tennessee. We’re not just sipping drinks; we’re pouring over the rich tapestry of sounds that connect the past and present of roots music. Nelson shares his journey from college radio to crafting a show that showcases diverse voices and classic influences, all while keeping it fresh and engaging. We’ll explore the venues that shaped his musical palate and, trust me, you’ll want to hear about his first encounter with Kasey Chambers that sparked a love affair with Americana music. So grab your favorite drink, kick back, and let’s unravel the threads of music that define us in this laid-back, high-taste gathering of music aficionados.
Nelson Gullett
Nelson was born in the deep dark hills of Eastern Kentucky in a town called Paintsville... just a few miles away from Loretta Lynn's cabin on the hill. He initially cut his musical teeth on pop artists of the 80s. Somewhere along the way, though, his mother instilled a love for songwriters such as Paul Simon and Jim Croce while his dad exposed him to early rockabilly rebels and the pioneers of rock and roll. Nelson was eventually introduced to the band R.E.M., and their blend of southern folk/rock in high school. In college, it was the Dave Matthews Band’s brand of roots-based jams that provoked him to drive for hours just to get to the next show. In college, he became fully engrossed in Americana music and stated hosting Americana Crossroads on Morehead State Public Radio. Nelson moved to Knoxville and started working for WDVX in 2006, where he now serves as Development Director and host of the weekly Americana Pulse radio show.
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indie music podcast, music nerd podcast, underground music podcast, music roundtable podcast, best new indie bands, independent music podcast, music discovery podcast, alternative music podcast, podcast for music lovers, dive bar music podcast, low key music podcast, deep cut music discussion, music tastemakers podcast, music festival discoveries, music zine culture, DIY music scene, touring musician stories, hidden gem bands, vinyl collector podcast, music conversations podcast,
Dive Bar Music Club, independent music podcast, Nelson Gullett interview, Americana music, WDVX Knoxville, community radio, music knowledge, music trends, roots music, music recommendations, live music venues, music history, music exploration, music fandom, music appreciation, folk music, bluegrass music, music festivals, supporting local radio, music cultureChapters
- 00:12 - Introducing the Cast of Characters
- 01:37 - Nelson's Musical Journey
- 03:12 - The Awakening of a Music Enthusiast
- 04:23 - Musical Memories of a Small Town
- 07:27 - Supporting the Arts: How to Help WDVX
- 08:00 - Fall Fund Drive Announcement
Takeaways
- The Dive Bar Music Club is all about chilled vibes and deep music discussions, making it a special hangout for music enthusiasts.
- Nelson Gullett's extensive experience in independent radio truly enriches the conversations around music's evolution and its diverse influences.
- Understanding how past music influences the present is key; it's all about connecting the dots through genres and artists.
- The significance of venues in shaping music memories cannot be overstated; they serve as cultural touchstones in our musical journeys.
- Supporting community radio like WDVX is crucial, especially during tough times for arts nonprofits; every small donation counts.
- The podcast encourages listeners to engage with music, whether through live shows or online platforms, to keep the spirit of independent music alive.
Mentioned in this Episode
- WDVX
- Morehead State University
- NPR
- Mountain Stage
- Beale Street Caravan
- Kasey Chambers
- Buddy Miller
- Graham Parsons
- Emmylou Harris
- Lucinda Williams
- Rodney Crowell
- Dar Williams
- James McMurtry
- Wilco
- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
- Greg Brown
- Webb Wilder
- Junior Brown
- Clack Mountain String Band
- Tyler Childers
- Chris Stapleton
- Iron and Wine
- BlueSky
- Threads
- YouTube
Transcript
Speaker A
00:00:00.640 - 00:00:47.780
Welcome to Dive Bar Music Club, the low key, high taste happy hour for music nerds. Each week we're joined by a rotating cast of true music fans, people who live and breathe independent music.
This week, I'll introduce you to one of our rotating cast of characters, veteran community radio host Nelson Gullett, currently with WDVX in Knoxville, Tennessee. He spent years in the trenches of independent radio and now bringing an incredible depth of real world music knowledge to our roundtable.
We're not about trends, we're about taste. Part hang, part deep dive, part time machine.
Grab your drink and pull up a stool and let's join Nelson Gullett for this week's session, a Dive Bar Music club. Hey, Nelson, thanks so much for joining us here with Dive Bar Music Club. So what have you been up to lately in the world of music?
Speaker B
00:00:48.340 - 00:01:15.280
What I try to do on my show is play a bunch of new music, highlight some diverse voices, and go back into the classics so we can connect and see how the music of the past is informing the present. Because that's a lot of what current roots music is.
There's so much to draw from, so many influences from the past and so many people out there blending all of that in interesting ways. And that's what I try to highlight on my show every week.
Speaker A
00:01:15.760 - 00:01:29.020
I think that's what makes your show so special. And I'm so glad that you've decided to be part of this adventure where we're figuring it out as we go. With Dive Bar Music Club.
You'll bring a lot of experience and knowledge to the conversations for a really broad range of music, which is important.
Speaker B
00:01:29.820 - 00:01:34.940
Yeah. Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be a part of whatever this is going to be.
Speaker A
00:01:35.260 - 00:01:44.220
Who knows yet? This will be fun. Nelson, we've known each other for a pretty long time, but I don't actually know how you ended up this deep in the world of music.
Speaker B
00:01:44.540 - 00:03:25.560
Well, it kind of started. I went to college. I was at Morehead State University.
I was undeclared into my junior year and finally just I gave up and started working at the college radio station. Right. I was doing the news internship, NPR newscast, working in the sports department, graduated, went to work in the world of commercial radio.
I was a news director at a commercial station in eastern Kentucky. And I got so bored with that that I went back to grad school.
And the music director there at Morehead State Public Radio knew I was a fan of, offered me an Americana shift. They had just started doing an Americana show four nights A week. And I didn't know what that was. He tried to explain it to me.
There was a lot of talk about country music, and I didn't want any part of it. This was the early 2000s. I thought country music was all Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus, and I. I turned him down.
So his response was to stick me on a Friday night board op shift from 8 to midnight. And he made me listen to the Mountain Stage in E Town and Beale Street Caravan every week for a semester.
I heard Casey Chambers one night on a Friday night. I was in his office Monday morning saying, who is this person? What can you tell me about it? He gave me the Barricades and Brick Walls album.
From that record, I discovered Buddy Miller and Graham Parsons and Emmylou Harris and Lucinda. A few months later, I'm seeing Casey Chambers live on the Mountain stage. And that same show had Rodney Crowell and Dar Williams and James McMurtry.
And I just. I kept jumping deeper and deeper, connecting the dots. Ended up just kind of hooked.
Speaker A
00:03:26.360 - 00:03:30.200
This is fantastic. And I did not know that origin story.
Speaker B
00:03:31.000 - 00:04:04.030
You know, it took a while. There was a period where I was, you know, in the local record shop once a week.
I bought the entire Uncle Tupelo discography in one go and just dove into it A few weeks later. It was all of Wilco up to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. You know, just little by little, I would take records home off the shelf every week.
And one weekend it's all Greg Brown. The next weekend it was all, you know, Webb Wilder or Junior Brown. And it just. It got into my bones.
Speaker A
00:04:04.910 - 00:04:21.450
This is fabulous. I love this, and I love the breadth of it, especially because I know what you're into nowadays as well.
And so you really have incredibly deep knowledge of music. And you do a really good job of explaining that to people.
And that's one of the reasons that I was like, yes, Nelson's going to be part of Dive Bar Music Club. This is great.
Speaker B
00:04:21.450 - 00:04:22.170
Well, thank you.
Speaker A
00:04:22.570 - 00:04:30.810
Absolutely.
I know we all don't get out to see as much live music as we would want, but do you have any favorite venues over the years that you've enjoyed seeing music?
Speaker B
00:04:31.210 - 00:05:55.480
You know, again, I grew up in a small town. There was no live music unless, like, Lee Greenwood came to the high school gym during the fall festival. Like, that was.
That was the only thing we kind of had. Growing up. When I got to doing the Americana work at my college station, there was a joint in Lexington, Kentucky, called the Dame.
And it was just right there in the middle of Downtown Lexington. We had an underwriting agreement with them where we would promote their shows and pretty much any show I wanted to.
I had a pair of tickets I could drive.
It was about an hour to Lexington from where I was and I would go see Nico Case and Scott Miller and Alejandro Escovedo and Old Crow Medicine show over the Rhine. They all played this joint, Iron and Wine I saw there. So it was about an hour away.
I didn't get there like every weekend or whatever, but, you know, every couple of months or so I would just take off after an air shift and drive up to Lexington and see what I could see. Morehead didn't really have anything at the time. It was still a dry city. So there. There was no. A few festivals here and there.
I would go see the Clack Mountain String Band, which was Jesse Wells, who now plays with Tyler Childer. Sometimes Chris Stapleton would sit in with them. But that was. That was. That was pretty much all we had back there.
So you had to travel to Lexington or I would go to Charleston to see the mountain stage. But that was. That was. That was pretty much it.
Speaker A
00:05:56.920 - 00:06:18.100
That was it. Anyway, good times. Good times. Yeah. It's funny how like venues can bring up such spec memories of like time, place, music, all of that sort of stuff.
I'm sure we'll be talking a lot more about that as we all get to know one another through the course of Dive bar Music club. One of the things I want to be sure people get a chance to do is share where they want to be found online.
Speaker B
00:06:18.980 - 00:07:11.370
My primary presence right now is Blue Sky, I guess@nelsonwdbx. I'm also on Instagram, which that posts to to threads as well. Though I'm not super active over there, those are probably the best places to find me.
Also wdvx.com My show is on Wednesday nights from 7 to 10:30 Eastern Time. I'll pop up occasionally in some other places, but we are 24 7. Americana music, folk blues, bluegrass, whatever we can throw in.
We have specialty shows that are all bluegrass. We've got an all blue show. We have, you know, different things at different times. We do live music six days a week.
Every Monday through Saturday at noon, there's a live show called the Blue Plate Special. You can stream all of that@wdvx.com and find some of those live videos through our YouTube channel too.
Speaker A
00:07:11.930 - 00:07:31.290
WDVX is really special, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, but obviously through the joy of the Internet, one of the upsides is being able to hear such eclectic and really thoughtful programming. We know that we are dealing with difficult times with arts nonprofits specifically right now.
How can people who find WDVX help you all out these days?
Speaker B
00:07:31.610 - 00:08:32.690
Well, they can go to our website, wdvx.com there's a support page where you can make a one time donation. You can become a sustaining member of the radio station as well, where you can do $5 a month, $10 a month, that sort of thing.
We have an online shop as well through the website or you know, even something as simple as watching those YouTube videos, sharing, liking, subscribing that, you know, helps us out in the, the algorithm and boost that funding a little bit. But we're about to kick off a fall fund drive in November.
We just had an emergency kind of recovery fund drive in August where we raised over a hundred thousand dollars in a month to replace most of what we lost through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for this year. That's, that's money that we lose every year going forward. So we're working on ways to cover that too.
But yeah, the best thing to do is just to go to the website, wdvx.comsupport that'll take you straight to a donation portal.
Speaker A
00:08:32.930 - 00:08:58.650
Perfect. And I hope that folks do stop in and check that out because of course we want everyone to continue helping support.
The arts and the music are an important part of everybody's life. And that's why we're all here to hang out with Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaking of which, it is important that y' all stop by, subscribe in, whatever your favorite podcast app is. Give those thumbs up likes, ratings, reviews, all the good stuff. You don't want any nice to say, feel free to step aside.
Nelson Gullett, thanks so much for being part of what we're going to be doing here with Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaker B
00:08:59.130 - 00:09:01.850
Yeah, thank you, Sloan. I'm, I'm excited to see where this goes.
Speaker A
00:09:02.810 - 00:09:20.230
That's last call at Dive Bar Music Club. If you like the hang, follow the show, leave a review and tell your algorithm, gosh darn it, we're worth it.
Better yet, share your favorite episode with a friend who actually stayed for the whole set. See y' all next time for the low key, high taste happy hour for music nerds.
Transcripts
Welcome to Dive Bar Music Club, the low key, high taste happy hour for music nerds.
Speaker A:Each week we're joined by a rotating cast of true music fans, people who live and breathe independent music.
Speaker A:This week, I'll introduce you to one of our rotating cast of characters, veteran community radio host Nelson Gullett, currently with WDVX in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Speaker A:He spent years in the trenches of independent radio and now bringing an incredible depth of real world music knowledge to our roundtable.
Speaker A:We're not about trends, we're about taste.
Speaker A:Part hang, part deep dive, part time machine.
Speaker A:Grab your drink and pull up a stool and let's join Nelson Gullett for this week's session, a Dive Bar Music club.
Speaker A:Hey, Nelson, thanks so much for joining us here with Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaker A:So what have you been up to lately in the world of music?
Speaker B:What I try to do on my show is play a bunch of new music, highlight some diverse voices, and go back into the classics so we can connect and see how the music of the past is informing the present.
Speaker B:Because that's a lot of what current roots music is.
Speaker B:There's so much to draw from, so many influences from the past and so many people out there blending all of that in interesting ways.
Speaker B:And that's what I try to highlight on my show every week.
Speaker A:I think that's what makes your show so special.
Speaker A:And I'm so glad that you've decided to be part of this adventure where we're figuring it out as we go.
Speaker A:With Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaker A:You'll bring a lot of experience and knowledge to the conversations for a really broad range of music, which is important.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Well, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker B:I'm excited to be a part of whatever this is going to be.
Speaker A:Who knows yet?
Speaker A:This will be fun.
Speaker A:Nelson, we've known each other for a pretty long time, but I don't actually know how you ended up this deep in the world of music.
Speaker B:Well, it kind of started.
Speaker B:I went to college.
Speaker B:I was at Morehead State University.
Speaker B:I was undeclared into my junior year and finally just I gave up and started working at the college radio station.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I was doing the news internship, NPR newscast, working in the sports department, graduated, went to work in the world of commercial radio.
Speaker B:I was a news director at a commercial station in eastern Kentucky.
Speaker B:And I got so bored with that that I went back to grad school.
Speaker B:And the music director there at Morehead State Public Radio knew I was a fan of, offered me an Americana shift.
Speaker B:They had just started doing an Americana show four nights A week.
Speaker B:And I didn't know what that was.
Speaker B:He tried to explain it to me.
Speaker B:There was a lot of talk about country music, and I didn't want any part of it.
Speaker B: This was the early: Speaker B:I thought country music was all Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus, and I. I turned him down.
Speaker B:So his response was to stick me on a Friday night board op shift from 8 to midnight.
Speaker B:And he made me listen to the Mountain Stage in E Town and Beale Street Caravan every week for a semester.
Speaker B:I heard Casey Chambers one night on a Friday night.
Speaker B:I was in his office Monday morning saying, who is this person?
Speaker B:What can you tell me about it?
Speaker B:He gave me the Barricades and Brick Walls album.
Speaker B:From that record, I discovered Buddy Miller and Graham Parsons and Emmylou Harris and Lucinda.
Speaker B:A few months later, I'm seeing Casey Chambers live on the Mountain stage.
Speaker B:And that same show had Rodney Crowell and Dar Williams and James McMurtry.
Speaker B:And I just.
Speaker B:I kept jumping deeper and deeper, connecting the dots.
Speaker B:Ended up just kind of hooked.
Speaker A:This is fantastic.
Speaker A:And I did not know that origin story.
Speaker B:You know, it took a while.
Speaker B:There was a period where I was, you know, in the local record shop once a week.
Speaker B:I bought the entire Uncle Tupelo discography in one go and just dove into it A few weeks later.
Speaker B:It was all of Wilco up to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Speaker B:You know, just little by little, I would take records home off the shelf every week.
Speaker B:And one weekend it's all Greg Brown.
Speaker B:The next weekend it was all, you know, Webb Wilder or Junior Brown.
Speaker B:And it just.
Speaker B:It got into my bones.
Speaker A:This is fabulous.
Speaker A:I love this, and I love the breadth of it, especially because I know what you're into nowadays as well.
Speaker A:And so you really have incredibly deep knowledge of music.
Speaker A:And you do a really good job of explaining that to people.
Speaker A:And that's one of the reasons that I was like, yes, Nelson's going to be part of Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaker A:This is great.
Speaker B:Well, thank you.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:I know we all don't get out to see as much live music as we would want, but do you have any favorite venues over the years that you've enjoyed seeing music?
Speaker B:You know, again, I grew up in a small town.
Speaker B:There was no live music unless, like, Lee Greenwood came to the high school gym during the fall festival.
Speaker B:Like, that was.
Speaker B:That was the only thing we kind of had.
Speaker B:Growing up.
Speaker B:When I got to doing the Americana work at my college station, there was a joint in Lexington, Kentucky, called the Dame.
Speaker B:And it was just right there in the middle of Downtown Lexington.
Speaker B:We had an underwriting agreement with them where we would promote their shows and pretty much any show I wanted to.
Speaker B:I had a pair of tickets I could drive.
Speaker B:It was about an hour to Lexington from where I was and I would go see Nico Case and Scott Miller and Alejandro Escovedo and Old Crow Medicine show over the Rhine.
Speaker B:They all played this joint, Iron and Wine I saw there.
Speaker B:So it was about an hour away.
Speaker B:I didn't get there like every weekend or whatever, but, you know, every couple of months or so I would just take off after an air shift and drive up to Lexington and see what I could see.
Speaker B:Morehead didn't really have anything at the time.
Speaker B:It was still a dry city.
Speaker B:So there.
Speaker B:There was no.
Speaker B:A few festivals here and there.
Speaker B:I would go see the Clack Mountain String Band, which was Jesse Wells, who now plays with Tyler Childer.
Speaker B:Sometimes Chris Stapleton would sit in with them.
Speaker B:But that was.
Speaker B:That was.
Speaker B:That was pretty much all we had back there.
Speaker B:So you had to travel to Lexington or I would go to Charleston to see the mountain stage.
Speaker B:But that was.
Speaker B:That was.
Speaker B:That was pretty much it.
Speaker A:That was it.
Speaker A:Anyway, good times.
Speaker A:Good times.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:It's funny how like venues can bring up such spec memories of like time, place, music, all of that sort of stuff.
Speaker A:I'm sure we'll be talking a lot more about that as we all get to know one another through the course of Dive bar Music club.
Speaker A:One of the things I want to be sure people get a chance to do is share where they want to be found online.
Speaker B:My primary presence right now is Blue Sky, I guess@nelsonwdbx.
Speaker B:I'm also on Instagram, which that posts to to threads as well.
Speaker B:Though I'm not super active over there, those are probably the best places to find me.
Speaker B: to: Speaker B:I'll pop up occasionally in some other places, but we are 24 7.
Speaker B:Americana music, folk blues, bluegrass, whatever we can throw in.
Speaker B:We have specialty shows that are all bluegrass.
Speaker B:We've got an all blue show.
Speaker B:We have, you know, different things at different times.
Speaker B:We do live music six days a week.
Speaker B:Every Monday through Saturday at noon, there's a live show called the Blue Plate Special.
Speaker B:You can stream all of that@wdvx.com and find some of those live videos through our YouTube channel too.
Speaker A:WDVX is really special, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, but obviously through the joy of the Internet, one of the upsides is being able to hear such eclectic and really thoughtful programming.
Speaker A:We know that we are dealing with difficult times with arts nonprofits specifically right now.
Speaker A:How can people who find WDVX help you all out these days?
Speaker B:Well, they can go to our website, wdvx.com there's a support page where you can make a one time donation.
Speaker B:You can become a sustaining member of the radio station as well, where you can do $5 a month, $10 a month, that sort of thing.
Speaker B:We have an online shop as well through the website or you know, even something as simple as watching those YouTube videos, sharing, liking, subscribing that, you know, helps us out in the, the algorithm and boost that funding a little bit.
Speaker B:But we're about to kick off a fall fund drive in November.
Speaker B:We just had an emergency kind of recovery fund drive in August where we raised over a hundred thousand dollars in a month to replace most of what we lost through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for this year.
Speaker B:That's, that's money that we lose every year going forward.
Speaker B:So we're working on ways to cover that too.
Speaker B:But yeah, the best thing to do is just to go to the website, wdvx.comsupport that'll take you straight to a donation portal.
Speaker A:Perfect.
Speaker A:And I hope that folks do stop in and check that out because of course we want everyone to continue helping support.
Speaker A:The arts and the music are an important part of everybody's life.
Speaker A:And that's why we're all here to hang out with Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaker A:Speaking of which, it is important that y' all stop by, subscribe in, whatever your favorite podcast app is.
Speaker A:Give those thumbs up likes, ratings, reviews, all the good stuff.
Speaker A:You don't want any nice to say, feel free to step aside.
Speaker A:Nelson Gullett, thanks so much for being part of what we're going to be doing here with Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaker B:Yeah, thank you, Sloan.
Speaker B:I'm, I'm excited to see where this goes.
Speaker A:That's last call at Dive Bar Music Club.
Speaker A:If you like the hang, follow the show, leave a review and tell your algorithm, gosh darn it, we're worth it.
Speaker A:Better yet, share your favorite episode with a friend who actually stayed for the whole set.
Speaker A:See y' all next time for the low key, high taste happy hour for music nerds.
