Biography

Patricia Cole Meloon Brown, known professionally as Katy Daley, made her mark as a bluegrass broadcaster in Washington, D.C., starting in the middle 1970s. She worked in both public radio and commercial settings and closed out this facet of her career with the world-wide streaming service WAMU’s Bluegrasscountry.org. In contrast to many on-air personalities who concentrate primarily on spinning records, Daley augmented much of her programming with live interviews of performers.

Daley’s journey to bluegrass was a circuitous one. She was born to a family residing in the Washington, D.C., area. Much of the family’s time in the late 1950s and early ‘60s was, for work reasons, spent in Tokyo and Okinawa. While there, Daley got her first taste of bluegrass. One day, an Armed Forces Radio program called Rice Paddy Roundup played the Flatt & Scruggs recording of “Pike County Breakdown.”  From that moment on Katy was hooked on the music.

Upon her return to the United States, Daley finished high school in Alexandria, Virginia, and enrolled in Brevard College in North Carolina. There, as in Okinawa, she heard the music on the radio, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that she heard it referred to as bluegrass. By this time, she had settled in the Washington metro area and, like many Washingtonians, was a government worker. This was when Katy started listening to Gary Henderson’s Saturday morning bluegrass program on American University’s WAMU-FM (88.5).

Invited by Gary to do a few bluegrass announcements, she decided not to use her real name. Ralph Stanley’s version of “Katy Daley” was on the turntable, so Gary used that as an introduction and the name stuck for the next 40 years.

What was intended to be a one-time visit to WAMU quickly became a weekly occurrence when Daley took over the task of assembling and reading on the air a weekly Bluegrass Bulletin Board of area concerts and happenings. Henderson’s finesse behind the microphone and his skill as his own engineer provided on-the-job training for Daley. In 1976, when Henderson’s day job as an NPR engineer took him to Kansas City for coverage of the Republican National Convention, Daley covered his shift at WAMU. Her successful solo flight earned her a two-hour show of her own that ran from 10:00 p.m. to midnight, two days a week.

Daley’s programming at WAMU, which tended to be contemporary in nature, presented a contrast to the more-staid approach featured by Gary Henderson. Podcaster Howard Parker noted that Katy’s “voice was the voice of the music for this suburban guy . . . she influenced what I heard and how I heard it, as something contemporary, not as museum pieces. As my own industry involvement developed . . . she became my mentor. My intent was to perform only engineering tasks, but Katy saw some potential in me that I failed to recognize on my own. I found myself ‘on mic,’ interviewing A&R [artists and repertoire], engineers, publicists, songwriters, and all the behind-the-scenes business types that made up the business of the bluegrass music. For Katy’s influence and mentorship I am eternally grateful.”

Daley’s sphere of influence spread far beyond the confines of her local listenership. Connecticut broadcaster Amy Orlomoski benefitted from Katy’s perspectives on bluegrass programming. “Several years ago, Katy took the time to talk to me about radio stuff, and she mentioned the importance of ‘broadcasting’ vs. ‘narrowcasting.’ This may seem like obvious advice, but it has definitely been helpful to me over the years. And I am just one person who has been influenced by Katy; she has always been willing to offer guidance to whoever she thought might be able to use some.”

Personnel changes at WAMU in January 1980 resulted in Daley’s departure from the station. WMZQ, a commercial country music station that was also located in the Washington metro area offered Katy a Sunday evening bluegrass show which lasted for three years. Despite favorable ratings, the show was seen as a diversion from the station’s mainstream country music format. Daley remained at the station for a total of 18 years; there she worked as an overnight DJ, AM program director, and finally, concurrent with her other duties, as a public affairs director.

Daley returned to WAMU in 2006 as part of the station’s streaming venture WAMU’s BluegrassCountry.org. The service boasted a worldwide listenership of 50,000 bluegrass fans. Her work there, initially as a morning air personality, resulted in two IBMA awards for Broadcaster of the Year in 2009 and 2011. Especially noteworthy were the station’s five-hour broadcasts of live bands from IBMA’s World of Bluegrass in Nashville and then in Raleigh. She remained on board until 2017.

Mentoring up-and-coming broadcasters came naturally to Daley. During her last stint at WAMU, newbie Brad Kolodner was one of her success stories. He related that “I signed on at Bluegrass Country Radio in 2013 (then called WAMU’s Bluegrass Country). I was fresh out of college and quite green as a radio host. Katy served as my program director for a stretch and was always there to provide wisdom and advice. She really boosted my confidence as a host and to really trust my choices. I’ve been nominated for the IBMA’s Broadcaster of the Year award four times. I owe much of my success in bluegrass radio to Katy!”

After retiring from broadcasting, Daley put her interviewing skills and contacts to use on several projects. From 2016 until 2018, she prepared a recurring column for BluegrassToday called “20 Questions with Katy Daley,” later changed to “Q&A with Katy Daley.” In announcing the series, the site noted that “as the situation allows, Katy will conduct interviews with bluegrass artists and personalities, bringing her wide knowledge of the music to bear. There won’t always be 20 questions, but you can be sure they’ll be good ones.”

Another project was a podcast series called Bluegrass Stories, which ran from 2019 to 2022 and was co-produced with Howard Parker. The series was billed as “stories about the business of bluegrass music and more” and contained 74 episodes in all. Interviewees included promoters, songwriters, engineers, educators, disc jockeys, and other bluegrass personalities.

In 2018 and 2019, Daley contributed award-winning liner notes to two compact disc releases. First was an all-star tribute album called Epilogue: A Tribute to John Duffey; it contained several appreciations, including Daley’s “John Duffey: The Father of Modern Bluegrass.” The following year, Daley authored notes for a repackaging of one of the all-time bestselling bluegrass releases, the Seldom Scene’s Live at the Cellar Door.

In 2022, Daley and her husband Bill Brown established the Katy Daley Broadcast Media/Sound Engineering Scholarship at the IBMA Foundation. The scholarship is given annually to individuals planning to study broadcasting or sound engineering at college or in a continuing education program with a bluegrass music focus.

In addition to her IBMA Broadcasting and Liner Note awards, Daley is the recipient of a 2019 IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award and the DC Bluegrass Union’s 2017 Washington Monument Award.

Gary Reid is a bluegrass music historian, journalist, producer, and actor based in Roanoke, Virginia.