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Launched from the DesOrmeaux Building in
downtown Lafayette on September 16, 1998,
louisianaradio.com offers Louisiana music – Cajun,
Creole, jazz, blues, swamp pop, zydeco, and New Orleans
R&B – 24 hours a day by rotating carefully
selected tracks from compact discs (no song is repeated
within a 36-hour period). The site also simulcasts a few
of the best Louisiana music programs from regional radio
stations, including Baton Rouge bluesman Tabby
Thomas’ weekly “Blues Box & Heritage
Show” and a live Saturday morning Cajun revue
broadcast from Fred’s Lounge, a Mamou bar where the
dancing and drinking start early. Louisianaradio.com includes a “Music Shop” where listeners can order many of the CDs they hear, chat and discussion boards where browsers can interact and offer feedback, and links to other Louisiana music and tourism websites. The site also broadcasts live over the web from Lafayette’s annual Festival International de Louisiane and Festivals Acadiens. “One of the first things we were told by quite a few people is, ‘You’re nuts,’” says Reese Fuller of the brothers’ decision to start the site with a bank loan and their own CD collections. “The second thing was, ‘You’ll never make any money doing that. You don’t have the marketing approach that everyone else does.’ But this is not about hooking computers up to one another. It’s about the people that sit behind the computers. It’s about uniting people who are geographically estranged from one another who have common interests. Well, now we’ve got 60,000 monthly listeners, and sponsors are knocking at our door because we created a community, so to speak.” The Fuller brothers come by their love of Louisiana music naturally. Natives of Pineville, they were inspired by a number of fine musicians on their mother’s side of the family, especially their grandfather, Vertis Roy “Peanut” Conn. Born near Hazlehurst, Mississippi, Conn played the fiddle in black juke joints as a child before walking all the way to Alexandria, Louisiana, at the age of 14 to join a hillbilly string band. He later led his own popular group during the 1940s, when Alexandria was a center for live music due to the proximity of several large military training bases. For Reese, his love of music manifested itself in jobs as a radio deejay, first in Pineville while still in high school, and later in Jackson, Mississippi. He enrolled at Millsaps, however, because he “wanted to be a writer.” Although he admits that hedonistic pursuits occasionally assumed priority during his undergraduate years, Fuller cites three professors as role models who helped him prepare – however unconsciously – for his future course in life. “Charles Sallis was one of the most insightful, compassionate, honest, down-to-earth individuals I’ve ever met,” he stresses. “He had the ability to listen to any idiot, and to take it and come out with some sort of rational explanation. Robert McElvaine had a sense of humor that was very cunning and biting that I don’t think half of the students understood because they had partied all night. Austin Wilson was another guy who was a constant thorn in my side. But he was a thorn, in retrospect, for a reason. He knew I was a know-it-all. So what he constantly did was challenge my notions of what I knew. “Millsaps, in a very indirect way, particularly being in the history department, gave me the ability to look at things in an objective manner,” Fuller continues. “Which is very difficult to do when you’re a Southern white male – you have an unconscious guilt about your past, and you’re trying to rectify where you are in history with what has happened in history… The history department gave me the background to appreciate my past, with all of its flaws, with all of its triumphs, and to apply it to something that I enjoy doing.” PREVIOUS PAGE | PAGE 2 OF 4 | NEXT PAGE |
