WHUR-FM

Well, Shirley, let me just say I showed out in D.C. last weekend.

Thank you to the whole D.C. WHUR, everybody showed up.

DMV showed up.

What's up, darling? They showed up.

A year later, in 1976, quiet storm becomes a surprise blockbuster radio format.

Starting with Howard University station 96.3 FM WHUR in Washington, D.C. on the epochal weekly show, Melvin Lindsey's Quiet Storm.

Ludicrously smooth shit that can morph from immediate pop ecstasy to deep background ambiance as the situation demands.

There's a fantastic Pitchfork essay written by the critic and author and friend of the show, Eric Harvey, that traces the 40-year arc of quiet storm from Marvin Gaye to the Isley Brothers to Luther Vandross to Anita Baker and on and on and on, all the way up to Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton and Jill Scott and beyond.

It's always...

WHUR.

Shout out to everybody at WHUR.

I'll be there.

I will come through the building.

And then we find out that, you know, Howard is, of course, one of the leading black universities in the world.

And... that they have the most powerful radio station on the East Coast, WHUR.

And that they had, in fact, been playing our music every day.

And there was a period where they were playing it almost every hour, one of our songs, my first album.

Everybody was there.

Including Lonnie B, Quicksilva, all the WHUR.

Like, there was a big event called The Bahama Breeze Music Festival that took place at the Atlantis down there, and Anthony Hamilton was performing with the Hamilton...

Well, they're now, they're now called The Tones, not the Hamiltones anymore.

So popular, in fact, that that song and songs from that album would be the theme music for R&B.

WHUR's news program in the afternoon, that program was called the Daily Drum, and they would use African rhythms as the theme song.

So here are these African rhythms being played on the radio in D.C. every day.

I always, again, remember my history of Indico, Juju, I've always had tremendous percussionists.