WJJC RADIO TURNING 50
Bill Anderson Returns To Station He Signed On A Half Century Ago
The man who signed WJJC Radio onto the air nearly 50 years ago will help the Commerce radio station celebrate its 50th anniversary next Wednesday morning with a live remote broadcast from Spencer Park.
Few other radio stations that morning will have a DJ who’s a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, but country music legend Bill Anderson will don the headset for at least two hours, 50 years to the day from when the Jackson County area first heard his voice on WJJC.
“We just thought it would be kind of interesting, being as he was the first voice heard, to have him come back and do it again,” said Rob Jordan, station manager.
WJJC was a daylight-only AM station boasting 1,000 watts, and Anderson was a journalism student at the University of Georgia serving as a part-time DJ. It has long been a part of local lore that Anderson, staying at the Andrew Jackson Hotel (now the Community Bank and Trust building on North Elm Street) wrote his first big hit, “City Lights,” in his hotel room. Anderson moved on to a fabulous career as a singer-songwriter in Nashville, but he’s kept close ties with Commerce in general and WJJC in particular ever since.
Anderson did a free concert at Tiger Stadium to help the radio station celebrate its 25th anniversary, and a similar concert for its 40th birthday kicked off the City Lights Concert series for a decade. That series is in hiatus due to difficulties getting singers for a late June outdoor concert, but there is speculation that it could resume if the new Commerce High School includes the expected performing arts center to which more than $400,000 raised by the concert and festival series has been earmarked.
Anderson will preside over the birthday party from the gazebo in the newly-renovated park, located on South Elm Street, across from the Commerce Post Office.
“We’ll have refreshments and give-aways, including one-of-a-kind things and T-shirts, and Bill will be signing autographs,” Jordan said. “You know how Bill is. He’ll just be Bill.”
The radio station was started by Albert Hardy, publisher of The Commerce News, who eventually sold it to Grady Cooper. The station later sold to Dallas Tarkenton, brother of former UGA and Minnesota Viking quarterback Fran Tarkenton, who sold it to Oscar Wisely, from which Don and Phil Brown, doing business as Jackson County Broadcasting, purchased it.
Over the course of the years WJJC has offered country music, bluegrass, gospel and soft rock music. Today, its menu serves up gospel and classic country, but Jordan hints about changes to come.
“We’ve gone through several changes,” he notes. “Right now we play gospel music and classic country, but there are some other changes on the horizon I am not at liberty to talk about.”
Jordan said those changes will become evident within the next 30 days.
Today, WJJC is a 24/7 station broadcasting at the same 1270 spot on the AM dial but with 5,000 watts and billing itself as “the voice of Jackson County.”
