WFPK’s Roots ‘n’ Boots About to Turn 24

This weekend, LEO Weekly posted an article that had been slated to publish in the print edition in September. Here’s my contribution.

Roots n’ Boots on 91.9 WFPK
3-6 p.m., Sunday
When Michael Young angled a fill-in DJ slot with Louisville Public Media into a weekly show featuring alt-country, or Americana, music, he gave no thought to how long he’d be spinning records every weekend. Roots n’ Boots will turn 24 in April and has become a weekly mainstay on WFPK.

“I did not think there would be any way I’d be doing it for 23 years,” he told LEO Weekly. “I didn’t know WFPK would even last 23 years.”

Young started dabbling in radio while he was in the Navy, sitting in at times on the internal radio station for the ship on which he was assigned. (It didn’t hurt that he was the only sailor who brought part of his CD collection on board, despite cramped living quarters.) When the late 1990s rolled around, alternative country music was starting to hit its stride, and the budding young DJ, who grew up on artists like Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, was interested in the genre. The show was born of that.

To this day, he programs Roots n’ Boots himself, spending his own money on a playlist catalog he has carefully curated over the years, with artists ranging from Lucinda Williams to The Jayhawks and beyond. That’s the stuff you hear for three hours every Sunday starting at 3 p.m. – for 23-plus years. Don’t look for him to quit spinning anytime soon, either. Why?

“It’s cheaper than therapy,” Young said. “Those three hours on the air every Sunday are the happiest three hours I have that week. I love playing music that I love and sharing stories that I love with an old friend on the other side of the microphone.” —Kevin Gibson

This post was originally published by LEO Weekly.