“We’re gonna go back in the alley and play some low down blues,” Brown Sugar tells WWOZ listeners. She’s been sweet talking New Orleans that way for years.

It keeps the phones ringing off the hook. Brown Sugar knows many callers by voice if not by name.

“I went home and told my wife that I wasn’t never coming back,” one caller says midway through her Tuesday afternoon blues show. “And she told me, ‘Brown Sugar ain’t gonna take care of no poor man.’” They both laugh.

“That’s right, baby,” she says. They flirt while the rest of New Orleans listens to Arkansas bluesman Johnnie Taylor. He’s called her for years but won’t send her a picture. She chats with him every time he calls but hasn’t told him her real name.

Brown Sugar is one of 50 volunteer DJs at 90.7 FM WWOZ (referred to locally as Oh-Zee). From the most shoestring of beginnings, the station has become a fixture in the local music scene and in the city. In the early ’80s, the founders started playing tapes from a transmitter located in a shack across the river. With the arrival of webcasting, OZ is now an international beacon of New Orleans jazz, R&B and all the roots music of South Louisiana. Besides Brown Sugar’s suitors, the station has an intensely loyal listenership.

Before becoming the mysterious voice known to New Orleanians as Brown Sugar, she was an avid listener and frequent caller. She was coaxed over the call-in line to come down to the station and volunteer. When she said hello over the air for the first time the phone started ringing. “It was the fellas wanting to know who that woman is,” she says.

Brown Sugar soon had her own show. Not wanting to share her real name she called herself Sugar. “I played Sugar, Sugar by Wilson Pickett a lot so I used that as a name,” she says. Then one day in the studio, station co-founder Jerry Brock suggested she become Bubbling Brown Sugar. She thought Brown Sugar was good enough and she goes by that for her blues show and her Sunday morning gospel show.

As she got more involved as a volunteer she became membership director. She left behind a music club, a liquor store and a carpet cleaning business to work for OZ at its tiny office just outside of the French Quarter. When her air-time rolls around, she grabs a satchel of her CDs from home and walks across the street into Louis Armstrong Park. The studio is situated in a cozy two-story building. She slips on the earphones, slides in a CD and cuddles up to the microphone to ask New Orleans, “Are you all ready for this action?”

Her voice has become part of New Orleans. It’s her voice coming over the airwaves in the opening scene of The Big Easy. She even found her name in a recent mystery novel also trying to capture the feel of the city.

OZ is a round-the-clock soundtrack for the city. Programming features jazz most prominently. The middle of the day is carved out for New Orleans music featuring funked up R&B by everyone from Dr. John to the Radiators. Any other music with roots in New Orleans can be found sometime during the week. That includes blues, Cajun and Celtic music, African and Caribbean sounds, Zydeco and gospel.

“Jazz Fest is a ten day festival,” says station manager David Freedman. “WWOZ puts on a 365-day festival.” Like the Jazz Festival and unlike most commercial radio stations, OZ’s mission is to present a great variety of music, especially by local musicians. Freedman says that the easiest way to see if you’re in New Orleans is to tune your FM radio to 90.7. “You’ll know,” he says.

OZ is a volunteer-staffed and listener-supported radio station. It’s one of the few community radio stations nationally that is not affiliated with a college or university. Members provide the bulk of support that keeps OZ on the air. The loyalty of those listeners is very important to the station. “We don’t have the most listeners,” says Freedman. “We have people who listen the most.” And they take pride in the station. “We have more bumper stickers than all the other stations combined. Anybody can buy a billboard. But not everybody will mess up their bumper for you,” Freedman says.

OZ has drawn enthusiastic support from its inception. Founders Jerry and Walter Brock came to New Orleans in the mid ’70s to start a community radio station. Just barely in their 20s, they had already helped two other community stations get off the ground before coming to the Big Easy. Though they weren’t familiar with the city’s music before they arrived, they immediately recognized it as an untapped resource. No commercial stations featured local artists.

As they applied for a license, local musicians held benefits to raise money for the project. In 1980, they broke onto the airwaves with 12 hours of daily programming. Jerry Brock spent his nights recording 90 minute tapes. The following day he would take them out to the shack that housed their transmitter. “We didn’t even have a phone out there,” he says.

A short time later, they were offered space above the music club Tipitina’s. A small apartment became their studio. They got their first caller on day one. “Snooks Eaglin called and said, ‘We hear you, Jerry,’” Brock says. Other now legendary musicians did programs for them. Art Neville, James Booker and many more got involved with OZ. Occasionally they hung a microphone in the club downstairs and broadcast live shows. Locals tuned in and the word got out. In the pages of Interview magazine, Andy Warhol declared OZ, “The greatest radio station on earth.”

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, the sponsor of Jazz Fest, also recognized OZ as a vital part of the music scene. When the station hit financial woes in the mid-’80s, the foundation stepped in and made a commitment to keep them on the air. The two organizations compliment each other well. OZ now broadcasts live from the festival. They make recordings of those shows and other concerts throughout the year. The CDs are distributed to OZ members and are not for sale anywhere.

Jazz is a mainstay on OZ. On late Tuesday afternoons, Lewis White hosts a three-hour show featuring everything from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue to the newest recordings of New Orleans jazzmen, Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison, Jr. A retired press agent and newsman from Alabama, White has always had a passion for music. “I can sing you the lyrics of any popular song between the ’40s and now,” he says.

The cool flow of White’s show belies his studio intensity. White is meticulous and finicky in planning his show. He draws heavily on his own collection of jazz, much of it on vinyl. He cues up a record, notes it in his log and ponders what to segue into next. “It helps to feel it,” he says while scanning down a record jacket. “The best actor couldn’t pull this off.” He stops momentarily to listen to Coltrane. “The blues is the key to this stuff,” he says. Then he quickly sifts through another stack of records.

How the DJs feel about the music is one of the only guidelines working at OZ. There are no playlists, which commercial stations use to keep very popular songs in heavy rotation. “Our DJs are happy if they can play something you’ve never heard before,” Freedman says. That fresh, live feel keeps OZ at the heart of the city’s music scene.

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