Folk station celebrates its deep roots

Folk music has often been described as the people's music, so it makes sense that Boston's folk station, WUMB-FM (91.9), came about through popular demand. The station, which is based at UMass-Boston, will be celebrating 25 years on air Wednesday.

The roots of the station, which also broadcasts at 91.7 FM in Newburyport and 1170 AM in Orleans, were humble. The year was 1968, and WUMB general manager Pat Monteith was a student at UMass-Boston, studying math: "There were a bunch of us who were tired of playing whist in the cafeteria and said, 'Let's start a radio station,' " she recalls.

But the path to broadcasting didn't run smoothly. "It took [about] three years to convince the university to apply for a license and another 10 years to combat everybody who was trying to prevent us from going on the airwaves," says Monteith.

In the interim, an early form of the station did broadcast to the UMass-Boston cafeterias. "We replaced all the jukeboxes on campus," says Monteith. During this time, she went on to get a master's degree in mass communications from Emerson College ( "I had to legitimize myself," she says) and was training students on the closed-circuit station.

Just as the battle to broadcast more widely was being won, another shift was occurring in the Boston market. The popular Cambridge folk station WCAS-AM (740) had been sold and flipped to an all-gospel format. (The frequency now broadcasts "beautiful music" as WJIB.) Outraged fans tried to fight the format change, collecting 18,000 signatures on petitions to send to the FCC, according to Monteith. The petition didn't stop the change, but it did inspire Monteith and her colleagues.

"We said, 'There are at least 18,000 people who want folk music,' " she says. "Nobody else is doing it. Let's do this."

The rest is history, some of which will be shared on Wednesday. Special programming will include playing a set every half-hour of the top three folk songs from each of the years that the station has been on air. The first set, from 1982, will kick off at 6 a.m. with Bill Staines's "Roseville Fair," Cindy Kallet's "Roll to the River," and Bill Morrissey's "Small Town on the River."

The celebration, which will continue throughout September, will also include reminiscences from longtime hosts and folk personalities, such as Dick Pleasants, the weekday 6-10 a.m. host.

"The challenge is to try to reach as many people as possible with as good music as possible," says Pleasants. The "Morning Express" host came to the station in 1995 but has been involved with the local folk scene since the '70s, broadcasting the music from WGBH-FM (89.7) and other stations. He stresses WUMB's role in the community, citing its two annual summer acoustic-music weeks, which feature classes in singing and playing, and the Boston Folk Festival, which celebrates its 10th anniversary tomorrow and Sunday.

"People are making the music as well as just listening to it," says Pleasants. "WUMB is trying to be as much as it possibly can be."

For more on WUMB's anniversary events, go to wumb.org/events/25theventideas.php. For more on this weekend's Boston Folk Festival, go to bostonfolkfesti val.org.