After playing non-stop Beatles music since last week, 106.9 on Milwaukee's FM dial flipped to a classic country format calling itself "Big Buck Country."
Milwaukee's radio dial already features such a format on WOKY-AM (920), which calls itself "The Wolf."
The format, which features songs from "country legends" of the 197os, '80s and early '90s, targets adults in the 35 to 64 age group.
The play list includes Garth Brooks, Alabama, Willie Nelson, Brooks & Dunn, Reba McEntire, Clint Black, Dolly Parton, Toby Keith, Oak Ridge Boys, Alan Jackson, Hank Williams Jr., Randy Travis, The Judds and George Strait.
On-air personalities will be introduced later.
A web site has launched at bigbuck1069.com.
The former smooth jazz station known as WJZX-FM dropped its format May 27, and before an expected change to a "top-40" music format, the rock station formerly known as "The Brew," WQBW-FM (97.3) jumped to that format the next day.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
