Editor’s note: Listen to Jeff Esworthy’s last official show from Oct. 30, 2024, using the player above.
A career that started at a “rinky-dink” student-run radio station and blossomed into a 28-year tour at YourClassical MPR and its national broadcasts came to a close on Oct. 30, as late-afternoon host Jeff Esworthy switched off his microphone. (Mostly — you’ll hear him occasionally as a fill-in host.)
Esworthy, who joined the network in 1996, has made radio his profession since college at Kent State University in Ohio. But his interest in the medium had its origins at about 6, when he listened to his dad’s cousin, a farmer/radio host, play Hank Williams records on the air and figured that was a pretty good gig. When he hit puberty, he was told, “Wow, you have a really good voice — you should be in radio!”
At Kent State, Esworthy took that advice to heart, majoring in telecommunications and minoring in ethnomusicology, an area of study inspired by falling in love with the Indian sitar at 16.
“I wanted to be a sitar player, but it’s a very different instrument — you have to dedicate your life to it,” he said. “So I got involved in folk music, first as a banjo player, then as a fiddle player and hammered dulcimer player.”
He calls himself a “front-porch picker — if the weather’s nice, you can find me on the front porch with a banjo.”
His eclectic musical interests served him well in his early career. That student station was across the hall from WKSU, the local National Public Radio station, and Esworthy says he “started hanging out there until they gave me a job.”
“The funny thing is that for the first 10 years, I was the guy allowed to do anything but classical music,” he added. “I was the folk guy, the bluegrass guy, the jazz guy, the hippie space-music guy.”
He hired on at a station in Kentucky that “didn’t have high standards” as a classical music host, Esworthy jokes, before returning to WKSU for about 10 years.
As an eventual host at YourClassical’s nationally syndicated radio service, Classical 24 (available online as YourClassical Radio), he worked his way around the clock.
“I started as the overnight guy for 10 years, then the midmorning guy, then the morning guy,” he said. “Now I’m the afternoon guy — I’ve covered all the bases there are.”
Esworthy says of his classical music tastes, “I’m steadfastly a Mozart guy and earlier — that’s the music that tends to appeal to me the most. I start losing interest when Beethoven comes along.”
He said his “unsophisticated” musical upbringing led him to this preference.
“I like music that’s simple and resolves. I know where it’s going to go.”
His work at MPR has connected him with “some extraordinary people.”
“I think this Classical 24 has changed the face of classical music on radio,” Esworthy said. “When I was first exposed to classical music on the radio, every announcer was a bona fide music scholar, dry as dust. They never told stories, just talked about opus numbers and key signatures. [Classical 24] discovered the secret of hiring not classical scholars, but music enthusiasts.”
He counts himself among the enthusiasts. In retirement, he plans to indulge his passion for what he calls “old-time music.”
“I’m a mediocre player of probably a dozen musical instruments that I plan to work at,” he said.
And some of his other hobbies are also, well, old-time. He loves archery, spear and tomahawk throwing, and flint knapping — the art of making tools and weapons out of stone.
“I spent 45 years in the ephemeral job of being a voice on the radio,” he said. “One of the appeals of stone toolmaking is that pretty much everything else — music, radio — it’s in the air and vanished.
“If I make an arrowhead, even a lousy one, it will be around a very long time. Even if no one knows I made it, it will still be around.”
At YourClassical MPR, “I felt like I fit in as a profoundly weird dude,” he said. “MPR has tolerated that for almost 30 years.”
He’s welcomed many overtures from listeners over those years and recalls one story that perhaps reinforced his career choice.
“Many, many years ago, I made a public appearance and a woman came up to me,” he said. “She said, ‘It’s very nice to meet you, but you’re nowhere near as good-looking as I thought you’d be.’ I was flattered that at least my voice is pretty.”
Listeners will still be able to hear that voice occasionally, as Esworthy will fill in as an on-call host when needed. Or they can just find him picking his banjo on the front porch.
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