Briana Oakley, WOJB DJ and News Director
The radio was on in my childhood home, always. A radio keeps songs alive – long after they’re hits – if you find the right station.
I was two years old when Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song climbed the charts, but my hometown station played it for years where it lodged in my mind. Belafonte’s energetic tenor belting, “Day-O, Day-O,” where it reverberated up the wooden stairs of a small house in North Menomonie, Wisconsin.
As a teen learning drums, the car radio became my portable music room and my gateway to rock and roll, leading me to mind-blowing world-beats from brothers of other mothers. Voodoo Child by Hendrix haunted my teens and Day-O became old and decidedly un-hip. Rock ruled, and I tossed Day-O to the wind like a well-worn carpet, exchanging it for a Steppenwolf kind of carpet and ride.
In the 70’s, Ginger Baker and Keith Moon were my gurus and they rattled my brain. I tried copying them, my hands building an iron-grip on my drumsticks like mighty magic wands. I figured if I gripped my Ludwig 5A’s tight enough, and pounded my drums hard enough, my boring Midwestern clothes would burst into technicolor garments, the kind worn by wizards, rock stars, and Jimi Hendrix’s voodoo child in flaming yellow and orange.
When my parents bought a small cabin on a lake in Northwest Wisconsin, a transistor radio perched on the ledge of a south-facing window for better reception. Almost 50 years now, and it’s still there. Over the years, I listened to that radio, waiting for the dawning of a wild child and a new song. Living in Ohio, I couldn’t visit the cabin often; but when I did, my first act was to light a fire and fire up the radio.
By the mid 80’s, I’d established my favorite station on the reliable transistor, and it was 88.9 WOJB. It was, and still is, my favorite station, a Public Broadcasting Channel located on the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Reserve. Radio humming, I’d turn immediately to WOJB for Old Tyme Radio Mysteries from the 1930’s. All the programming appealed to my imagination and vocabulary: The Writers Almanac, Lake Woebegon, Pow Wow Chants in Ojibwa, and other Indigenous languages.
Through WOJB, Mountain Stage came to me from West Virginia, Thistle, and Shamrock from Celtic Lands and I’d hear local news, National Native News, Morning Edition, and other National Public Radio programming.
By then I’d learned all rock and roll stations sounded the same with drums increasingly resembling subways and screaming guitars doing nothing for my imagination. Nothing fired my curiosities like the playlists and pauses of WOJB. If I wanted to hear about protests for peace, or long interviews on important topics, information deserving of much more than a 30-second sound bite, I turned to WOJB.
In the Internet age, I listened to WOJB from Hawaii. Now I listen in Arizona. In 2010, I visited the studio with my Irish band, “The Magees,” to play live and to promote an upcoming performance in Northwest Wisconsin. I bought a WOJB sticker there and still have it on my guitar case. My story with WOJB is both remote and on-site.
It is April 2024, my 40th year of listening to WOJB.
I’m not in Wisconsin, Hawaii, or Ohio, but Arizona. I get up at 4:30, put on coffee, and find WOJB with radio.net. I want to hear my daughter Briana. She’s on the mic having just started the job as News Director. She starts at 5:00 am, but there is a two-hour time difference, so I want to catch her jocking early in the show before some of the words garble her tongue.
She’s on and talking with a guest about wood ticks, and like any non-Indigenous person, she’ll struggle with Ojibwa words and pronunciation, even after taking Ojibwa in a language class at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. How would we do when black coffee is Muckadaymashkeekiwabu, deer fat is Mushkawujibemiday, and Aaniish Eshnikaazyn asks, What’s your name?
In a few months, I will get up there to visit. It will be too late for the spring arrival of loons (maang), but not too late to catch the latest news about the Lac Court Oreilles Honor the Earth pow wow which I hope to attend. My connection with WOJB is strong, even more so now that Briana is there. Maybe I’ll return to the studio, this time sans drum or guitar, but with happiness for my daughter sitting behind the mic, her clear voice riding the winds, spinning tunes, and reading the news.
I’m glad she’s found a niche in the world of work. Her job is unlike many other jobs where the rigid and punitive world of Capitalism eventually drives many into the dirt. In her new world, the language of deer fat is still important and so is the pow wow. It’s a time and place long past, where its natural to redefine faith, thistle, and shamrock. A time and place where misty dawns and wind-frayed cattails are cherished in a soft radio chant.
WOJB woodland community radio of the Northwoods, a 2021 Radio Jock’s cant in smoky voice and response in lyric phrase and guitar.
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