A radio DJ lives her life in a spin cycle.

by Jess McCuan   .   photos by Brent Fleury

It’s a dream gig for a music junkie. Ashley “Bad Ash” Davis, 26, rolls out of bed at 9 and drives to the Asheville FM radio station 105.9 “The Mountain,” where she spins her favorite hard rock tunes. Zeppelin. Deep Purple. Aerosmith. Then Davis, a self-described “party girl” who’s been deejaying since age 19, drives to Asheville’s 98.1 “The River,” where she plays tunes by local bands like Soulgrass Rebellion and The Enemy Lovers. Then, if it’s early enough, she’ll head out to hear live music and hang with her friends. “I’m not turning on Bad Ash,” she says of her in-your-face, bad-girl radio persona. “I call it my alter ego, but it’s really mostly me.”

DJ duty isn’t always a party. Guitarist and singer-songwriter Laura Blackley, who hosts two shows on the Isothermal Community College station WNCW, has a one-year-old daughter and helps run a six-acre farm. Some days—after she milks the goat, of course—she makes a two-hour round trip from her Candler farm to the station in Spindale, where she puts in a ten-hour shift producing, among other things, Local Color and Southern Sirens. That’s in addition to playing about five gigs a month with her newly-formed band the Swayback Sisters, plus occasional solo shows. But being a radio DJ gives her a different kind of butterflies than performing on stage. “I love being on the air. I love this job,” she says. “You learn something about a different musician every day.”

Kim Clark, 51
Station: WTZQ, AM 1600, Hendersonville

After 11 years at WNCW in Spindale, Kim Clark is finally running her own show. Her first job, at age 14, was at a record store in Morganton where the setup couldn’t have been more quaint: she took customer requests at the front counter and then walked to the back, pulled a record from the shelf and spun it. Later, after sales and management positions at two national drugstore chains and a music distributor, she worked her way up to the program manager spot at WNCW. Late last year she switched things up by moving to WTZQ, an AM station in Hendersonville, where she does her own weekly show, Kim Clark’s Record Shack. Basically, she digs deep into her vast personal record collection for rare 78s and 45s that show off overlooked artists—like country-blues crooner Ella Mae Morse or Motown diva Kim Weston—who came out with groundbreaking sounds in their respective eras but never managed to make it big.

Unlike most music purists, Clark isn’t convinced that downloading and the digital era have given the music industry the blues. To be sure, they cut into the profits of fat-cat recording companies. But in fact, being able to download a single tune—as opposed to a whole album—is reenergizing music. “I think the golden age of pop music preceded the era of albums,” she says. “I like the singles era, with a few exceptions.”

Laura Blackley, 39
Station: WNCW, 88.7 FM, Spindale

Would Laura Blackley like to be the next Lucinda Williams? Sure. “Carnegie Hall? Heck yeah, sign me up,” she says. For years the Virginia native didn’t mind the traveling musician routine—performing in small clubs around the country, crashing on friends’ couches. Now, especially with an infant at home, she’s really enjoying sleeping in a cozy bed at night. She’s also digging the DJ gig, which she’d only been doing for about one year when she came in 3rd in the “Best Local Radio DJ” category in 2009 by readers of the Mountain Xpress. Last year she joined forces with Nikki Talley and Lindsay Wocjik to form the Swayback Sisters, a folky, soulful, roots-rock trio that performs at regional venues and festivals.

Blackley has a degree in therapeutic recreation. Seriously. It’s like social work, she says, and is mainly about encouraging people to be active and take risks. “If that doesn’t prepare you for a world of taking bands on the road, I don’t know what would,” she says.

Something her radio listeners and fans might be surprised to learn is that Blackley considers herself a rather private person. She’s always taken aback when she’s sitting at a coffee shop and someone recognizes her face from the stage or her voice from the radio. “It’s almost like flipping a switch,” she says. “When you’re entertaining, you’re entertaining. When you’re not, you want to live a normal life.”

Ashley “Bad Ash” Davis, 26
Stations: 105.9 FM “The Mountain,” and 98.1 FM “The River,” Asheville

You could call Bad Ash a shock jock, though she claims she’s not trying that hard. “Do people find me shocking? Yes. Some people say, ‘I can’t believe you said that
on the radio,’” she says. “If it shocks you, yes, I’m a shock jock. But no, I don’t try to be one.”

Davis was raised in rural Illinois, where her teachers knew her as a notorious blabbermouth. She got interested in radio during high school after an apprentice program at a local radio station. Since then it’s been radio all the way, with a bachelor’s degree in radio and steady DJ gigs for the past eight years. She’s never been afraid to let it all hang out. Or play the clown a bit for entertainment purposes. A few years ago, when she was sidekick to a DJ named Fook on a late-night Chicago show, her nickname was the Space Cadet. “Every day I make a fool of myself a little,” she says. “You’ve gotta be wide open when you do what I do."