Long before he became the voice of Red Bay, Jack Ivy was making his mark in the broadcasting industry and working alongside some legendary names in the music business. He left, though, for better-paying work. No one can blame him for that; it’s just a normal part of life.
There is an old saying goes that for those in the print business we have ink in our veins – and it’s hard to get away from the business. For Jack, it’s not ink; it’s music in his soul. That’s what brought him back to his first love.
Ivy, who alongside his wife Deneca owns Ivy Broadcasting, has become synonymous with the Red Bay and Belmont communities. Whenever there is a major community or high school athletic event, Ivy can typically be found with camera in hand or mounted on a tripod, ready to capture the memories in video or audio for area residents.
Ivy, who grew up in Belmont and graduated from Belmont High School in 1972, acquired WRMG from former owner Jimmy Pyle in August 2001. Upon doing so, he re-entered a career full-time that he had left full-time in 1977. Then again, it’s not like he ever really left broadcasting. It’s what he wanted to do from an early age. He got his broadcast license in 1973, about the time he turned 19.
“In those days it was kind of hard to get your broadcasting license from the FCC because you had to pass element one and element two, which was more rules and regulations,” Ivy said. “Most people passed that, but to get a broadcast endorsement you also had to pass element nine, which got into the technical stuff. I’m sitting in Atlanta with 25 people from a 50-mile radius of here who had been taking a class studying for about six weeks for the test. I didn’t get to go to the class, so I had to study on my on. There were 23 people came back off that trip disappointed. There were only two who passed it, me and a Lambert guy from Iuka.”
Ivy wasn’t able to take the classes with everyone else, but he had a little bit of a leg up: He was getting experience behind the board.
“They had one little loophole that if you could get somebody with a first-class license to take you under their wing, they could get you a permit that was good for a year. That’s what I did,” Ivy said. “I went to the station and talked to the manager, I guess that was before I even turned 18. I’ve always known, even in school, that’s what I wanted to do. I went over there and convinced him that was what I wanted to do. He went into the production room and handed me some copy off the United Press International teletype machine and got me to record it. He came back and said, ‘Not too bad for somebody who hasn’t done this.’ I know he was just making me feel good. His name was Danny Floyd. He said, ‘You’ve convinced me that I want to help you.’”
That first station Ivy worked at was WTIB, or T-105 FM in Iuka, now known as WKZU, Kudzu 104.9. Floyd contacted the FCC and got the permit. Ivy was attending classes at Northeast Mississippi Community College at the time, and Davis let him work on the air on Saturday nights six to midnight and Sunday afternoons 2-6 after he received his permit.
One day while at WTIB he got a call from Charles Manson. He’s quick to point out it wasn’t THE Charles Manson, but the general manager of Big River Broadcasting in Florence, the parent company of WQLT and WXOR and owned by Sam Phillips of Sun Records fame. They wanted to talk to him about a job. He was offered a job and went to work there in 1974.
“I used to be on the air and the phone would ring and it would be Sam Phillips,” Ivy said. “He used to talk to me on the phone and want me to put him on the air, talking about the station.”
Ivy found himself as the new kid on the block working around some big broadcasting names in the Shoals area, including Mitchell Self, one of the owners of competing station WLAY, and Jim Smith and Jerry Grisham, who went by the on-air name of Jerry Knight. One day there was a message at work for Ivy to call a number he didn’t recognize. Turned out it was Self and Smith of WLAY, who had been hearing him on WQLT. At that time WLAY was an AM station but, having been on the air more than 40 years, was the market leader. In January of 1975, Ivy went to work for WLAY.
During his WLAY days he got to hang out at the recording studios a good bit. “I used to go down to Fame or Broadway. They used to call me and say a new artist had been in town. One I remember is Rod Stewart. He had recorded the Atlantic Crossing album, which included the songs Sailing and This Old Heart of Mine. The recording studio would call me and they would have a couple of different mixes for a song. They knew what it sounds like in the studio, but wanted to hear what it would sound like on the radio. So they would bring me a copy of it and get me to play the two mixes on the air. It was kind of fun being the first disc jockey to play a lot of those songs on the radio anywhere, even though they were big artists. When it got ready to be sent off to be pressed, they would go ahead and give us that copy. So we would be the first station to play it on their air, and you for sure didn’t let your competition have a copy.”
He left radio work in 1977 to go into retail management with Badour in Memphis, the parent company of Fred’s stores. He worked two years in a store and got promoted to the home office, where he worked in radio and television advertising. He worked with Badour for almost 10 years before coming back home to work with regional retailer Sparko. He then left Sparko to go into in another sales company, where he worked until he bought WRMG in 2001.
Throughout that time, though, he never truly left broadcasting. During his time in Memphis, Ivy helped get a cable television station on the air in Collierville, Tenn. In 1981. On the side Ivy was broadcasting Collierville football games through Heritage Cablevision. When Ivy left Memphis for Golden, it opened the door for him to immediately move into covering Belmont sports for a familiar station: Kudzu 104.9. Though the call letters had changed, the station that gave Ivy his start brought him back to the airwaves in Tishomingo County.
This continued until Pyle approached Ivy to gauge interest in Ivy’s purchase of the station. He signed the papers on a Thursday night and took over the station the next morning. Red Bay’s first football game of the season was that night, and Ivy had it covered.
Since taking over Ivy has made many changes, including moving the studio to its current location on Golden Road and adding the television channels. Ivy quickly expanded the sports coverage of the station to include all Red Bay basketball, baseball and softball games. The reception was so good that in 2002 Ivy launched TV channels in the Belmont and Iuka.
“If Belmont, Tishomingo County and Red Bay have played football since 2002, I’ve got every game on DVD. On basketball I’ve probably got 80 percent or more of the games. On baseball I’ve probably got a master copy of all of them. People still call and say, ‘boy, I wish I had a copy of that 2002 game. You haven’t still got it, do you?’ Yes, I do.”
Perhaps the greatest change to the radio station came in 2016, when Ivy began broadcasting the radio station on FM frequency 97.9 and changed from a country music format to classic rock, where he has roughly 2,000 different songs that rotate through his playlist. He moved the gospel and country music format to the TV stations, which are cable channels 12 (in Red Bay) and 97 (in Tishomingo County).
As times have changed and the analog world has moved to digital to streaming, Ivy said his business hasn’t been affected by shifting consumer demands. Ivy said he is constantly looking down the road to try to stay ahead of the technology curve. He has taken advantage of Internet capabilities to stream his programming, allowing listeners anywhere in the world to hear live sporting events or watch any of his community programs on Facebook Live.
“I’d like for people to go to games when they can, but if they can’t we like for them to be able to listen to them here,” Ivy said. “We’ve got listeners in Chicago. Danny Latham, who graduated from Red Bay listens from there; John Matson listens from Scarborough, Maine. They wouldn’t miss a game on Friday nights.”
The actual physical operation of a radio station has changed as well.
“Disc jockeys used to talk a lot more back when I started,” Ivy said. “You were introducing songs in and out.” This has change in large part due to automation, which Ivy said has been good for small stations like his. He uses computer programs to keep up with not only tracks of music playing, but also weather reports as well. One program operates on one computer with his music files stored on another machine. Should Ivy need to make a programming change or update the weather while a song is playing live, the next time the program pulls the weather file it will automatically grab the updated file. It allows commercials to be scheduled. What this allows is for music and programming to be scheduled and played when there is no one physically at the station. Ivy can even access the program from his tablet or smartphone and make changes remotely, if needed.
So what does the future hold for Ivy Broadcasting?
“No retirement,” he said with a smile. “I just want to keep improving on doing what we’re doing. Our niche is the sports. You have to try to find a niche in a small market, something people enjoy.”
