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WMMT FM 88.7

WMMT WMMT is Appalshop’s community radio station, broadcasting to eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, and worldwide on the internet. The station aims to be a 24-hour voice of mountain people's music, culture, and social issues; to provide broadcast space for creative expression and community involvement in making radio; and to participate in discussions of public policy that will benefit our coalfield communities and the Appalachian region as a whole

… the best things are just the voices and the little things like the weather reports and the comments from the DJs and callers.  I listen to a lot of public radio from around the country, and a good deal of it ends up being pretty homogenous.  I like the way you guys have kept the regionality, not only in the programming, but in the people at the station.  It’s unique, in my experience.­ –John Adams, a transplanted southwest Virginian and internet listener

WMMT marked its 20th birthday with an all-day broadcast party on Thanksgiving 2005. The Appalshop Gallery hosted the exhibit “ One Score, and More,” with 20 years of station memorabilia. Recorded “Geezer” stories which long-time friends have shared with us will be broadcast for months to come.

The past year has seen the station deeply involved in music projects both on the air and in the community. Some of the nation’s top bluegrass bands are our guests on Bluegrass Express Live. We broadcast the concert portions of Appalshop’s Seedtime on the Cumberland festival, the Old Time Fiddle and Banjo Day, concerts, and the grand finale concerts of the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School. In the coming months the station will partner with the Ralph Stanley Museum, the Elkhorn Heritage Council, Mountain Empire Community College, the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, and Virginia’s Crooked Road to broadcast live concerts from across the region and to assemble an online database of musicians, venues, music teachers, and other resources. WMMT is completing work on a one-hour documentary on the life of country music pioneer Lily May Ledford, which will go to public radio stations nationwide. We are in the planning stage of a national radio documentary on the multi-cultural history of the banjo.

Health care played a continuing role in WMMT’s programming in 2005. The station worked with Kentucky Action to produce a series of anti-smoking public service announcements that were distributed to stations statewide. Spring 2006 will see the distribution of a 60-minute educational CD on diabetes, distilled from the six-hour series “Living With a Killer: Coping with Diabetes in Central Appalachia.”

WMMT is rebuilding seven of its eight translators, upgrading the ones in Coeburn and Big Stone Gap, Virginia, from 10 watts to 100 and bringing the signal to new listeners. The station has applied for funding to replace its main transmitter.

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