Memphis has as strong a claim to the blues as Chicago — and an even stronger claim to the crossroads where blues became everything that followed. Beale Street was already the commercial and cultural center of Black Memphis when W.C. Handy transcribed the blues he heard there into sheet music in the 1910s, creating the first published blues compositions and starting the chain of influence that runs through Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters to Chuck Berry to rock and roll. Sun Records on Union Avenue recorded Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and B.B. King in the same years of the 1950s. Stax Records on McLemore Avenue created a rougher, more organic soul sound than Motown — the soul of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Isaac Hayes, and Al Green — that became the emotional core of American popular music. Memphis radio carries all of this history. These eight stations connect listeners to the full depth of Memphis's musical legacy, from the Beale Street blues to the Stax soul to the contemporary R&B that carries the tradition forward.
Memphis Community and Public Radio
WEVL FM — Memphis, TN
WEVL FM is Memphis's volunteer community radio station and the city's most important independent music radio operation — a non-commercial station that has programmed blues, soul, jazz, and roots music since 1981, making it the Memphis equivalent of WWOZ in New Orleans. WEVL's programming reflects the full depth of Memphis's musical heritage: the Delta blues, the electric Beale Street tradition, the Sun Records rockabilly period, the Stax soul recordings, and the contemporary blues and Americana that working Memphis musicians continue to produce. The station's volunteer DJs bring genuine expertise and passion to their programming — people who live in Memphis because of its music, who know the local scene from the inside, and who program with a depth of knowledge that commercial radio cannot replicate. For any listener who takes the blues seriously, WEVL is the radio equivalent of a Beale Street club at its best: the real thing, without the tourist overlay.
WKNO FM — Memphis, TN
WKNO FM is Memphis's NPR affiliate, providing the public radio journalism and cultural programming that places Memphis's music in its broader historical and social context. The Memphis music story is inseparable from the city's racial history — the segregated recording industry of the 1950s, the Stax Records story of interracial collaboration in a city that was legally segregated, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in 1968, which ended both a life and an era. WKNO covers Memphis as a place where music, race, and history are permanently intertwined, and its journalism reflects that complexity. The station's music programming includes blues and roots features that situate Memphis's music in its historical context, making WKNO essential listening for anyone who wants to understand Memphis music as more than entertainment — as the product of a specific history of suffering, creativity, and cultural exchange.
Memphis Soul and Gospel
WLOK Radio — Memphis, TN
WLOK Radio is one of Memphis's historic Black radio stations, with roots going back to the 1950s when it was a pioneering Black-owned station in the South — programming gospel, soul, and R&B for the African American community at a time when white-owned radio stations rarely played Black music or hired Black DJs. WLOK's history is part of Memphis's civil rights story: Black radio stations in the mid-century South were not just entertainment but community infrastructure, providing information, culture, and cultural affirmation to communities excluded from mainstream media. The station's gospel programming reflects the role of the church in Memphis's Black community — the gospel roots of the soul music that made the city famous, the relationship between Mahalia Jackson's gospel and Otis Redding's secular soul. For the listener who wants to understand Memphis music from the inside of the community that created it, WLOK's history and programming provide an irreplaceable perspective.
WRBO — Memphis, TN
WRBO programs the urban contemporary R&B and soul format for Memphis's Black community — the contemporary music that continues the Stax soul tradition in the streaming era. Memphis's R&B community is still active; the city has produced contemporary artists across hip-hop, soul, and the hybrid genres that have emerged from those traditions, and WRBO programs the current output alongside the classic material that establishes the tradition. The Stax sound — tight rhythm sections, horn arrangements, raw vocals — has been enormously influential on contemporary R&B production, and Memphis musicians continue to find ways to update that sonic identity for new audiences. WRBO provides the contemporary R&B complement to the blues-focused stations, ensuring that Memphis radio covers the full range of the Black music tradition from the original blues through to the present.
Memphis Rock and Country
96X — Memphis, TN
96X is Memphis's rock station, and in Memphis rock radio carries a specific historical weight — the city where rock and roll was invented. Sun Records produced the first Elvis Presley records in 1954, and the rockabilly fusion of country and blues that Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis created there was the direct origin of rock and roll as a genre. 96X programs the classic rock that followed from that moment: the music that grew from the rockabilly seeds Sun planted in the mid-1950s through the British Invasion that brought it back to America transformed, and into the hard rock and alternative rock eras that followed. For Memphis listeners, classic rock is hometown music in a way it isn't anywhere else — the genre was created here, and the stations that program it are programming the local tradition as much as any blues station.
RadioBilly365 — Memphis, TN
RadioBilly365 programs rockabilly and early rock and roll — the music that Sun Records created in Memphis in the 1950s, which represents the most direct musical legacy the city has contributed to world culture. Rockabilly is blues with a country accent and a backbeat, created by young white Southerners absorbing the Black music they grew up hearing and producing something genuinely new from the collision. RadioBilly365 programs this moment of creation and its aftermath: the original Sun recordings, the contemporaries who recorded in the same style across the South, and the rockabilly revival artists who have kept the sound alive. For the Memphis music pilgrim who comes to the city because of Elvis and Sun Records rather than B.B. King and Stax, RadioBilly365 programs the specific music that made Memphis a rock and roll origin point — the music that, more than any other, changed what popular music would become.
FM 100 — Memphis, TN
FM 100 programs adult contemporary country and pop for Memphis — the mainstream commercial sound that serves the broad mid-market audience across the Mid-South region that Memphis serves as a radio center. FM 100 covers Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas listeners who want the accessible middle of the dial: country that isn't too hardcore, pop that isn't too young, and the classic hits format that works for the multi-generational audiences of smaller markets. In the context of Memphis's musical history, FM 100 represents the commercial mainstream that exists alongside the legendary scenes — the radio station that most Memphians actually listen to most of the time, providing the context within which the blues clubs and the Stax Museum operate as cultural institutions rather than everyday entertainment.
B 97.7 — Memphis, TN
B 97.7 provides Memphis with contemporary top 40 and rhythmic pop — the mainstream commercial format that serves the city's younger listeners and provides the current hit music that connects Memphis's youth culture to the national pop mainstream. Memphis has always had a dual musical identity: the legendary heritage music that draws pilgrims from around the world, and the everyday popular music that Memphians actually listen to at any given moment. B 97.7 programs the latter — the current hits, the trending artists, the pop format that makes no claims to historical significance but serves the legitimate desire of a city's young people to hear the music of their own era rather than their grandparents'. In a city that carries as much musical history as Memphis, there is something valuable about a station that programs the present without nostalgia.
For more blues and Southern music content, see our posts on Memphis radio stations, blues radio online, and soul radio online.
