Most country radio stations are named after their frequency or their city. This one has a steel guitar legend baked into its call letters, even if most listeners today have no idea.
Founded by a Member of Bob Wills's Band
KAMO signed on in Rogers, Arkansas on September 16, 1954, giving the town of about 5,000 people its first AM radio station. According to the Echoes of the Ozarks history series, the station was a joint effort between Leon McAuliffe, the steel guitarist who spent the 1930s and early 1940s playing with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and his manager G. Don Thompson, who left a television job in Tulsa to help build it. The call letters stood for the four states the signal was meant to reach: Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
The Band That Gave Country Music "Take It Away, Leon"
McAuliffe was not a minor figure brought in for name recognition. He helped write "San Antonio Rose" alongside Wills and composed "Steel Guitar Rag," a recording credited with helping popularize the pedal steel guitar in American music, according to his own biography. Wills's spoken introduction on Playboys recordings, "Take it away, Leon," became one of the most recognizable catchphrases in western swing. By the time he co-founded KAMO in 1954, McAuliffe was already one of the genre's defining instrumentalists, and he brought that pedigree directly into the station's first days on air by hiring his old bandmate, Texas Playboys drummer William "Smoky" Dacus, as KAMO's first on-air personality.
An FM Sister Signal and a New Owner
The station's FM counterpart, KAMO-FM, launched in 1971 at 94.3 MHz, eventually becoming the dominant signal under the KAMO name. Ownership passed through the decades until the station landed with Cumulus Media, which still operates it today as part of its national radio group.
Nash Icon: A Format Built for Artists Like McAuliffe
In the 2010s, KAMO adopted Cumulus's Nash Icon branding, a format created specifically to give airtime back to established country artists who had lost regular rotation on mainstream country radio. As Saving Country Music reported at the format's 2015 launch, Nash Icon was built around a roughly 25-year window of catalog country, giving veteran and legacy artists a home rather than chasing only current hits. It is, in effect, a modern echo of exactly the problem McAuliffe's generation of musicians eventually faced as radio moved on to newer sounds, except this time the format was built to solve it.
A Full-Circle Signal Over the Ozarks
Seven decades after a Texas Playboys steel guitarist put Rogers, Arkansas on the radio map, the frequency he helped launch now specializes in preserving space for country's elder statesmen. Few stations in the format can claim a founding story this directly tied to the genre's own instrumental history.
Tune in to 94.3 Nash Icon on Radio Shuffle for country radio from a station a western swing legend built from the ground up.