On March 29, 1979, the station first signed on the air as WMSR-FM, licensed to the city of Manchester, Tennessee. It began focusing on the Nashville market in the early 1990s. Manchester is nearly halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga, but the Cumberland Plateau prevents a Manchester FM signal from penetrating Chattanooga, and vice versa. Currently, its covers most of Middle Tennessee, even venturing into parts of Northern Alabama and Southern Kentucky. The city of license changed to Hendersonville in 2008, as part of a larger project that saw four of Cumulus' five Nashville stations change cities of license in the process of allowing sister stationWNFN to move its transmitter and increase power. The station was mired in bankruptcy in the early 1990s until being purchased by Gaylord Entertainment Company in 1995. Gaylord also owned 650 WSM and 95.5 WSM-FM, as well as the Grand Ole Opryconcert hall and Opryland USAamusement park. During this period, WWTN broadcast a mixture of locally originated general interest talk programming, sports talk, and the Business Talk Radio Network. Within three years subsequent to the Gaylord purchase, WWTN was Nashville's highest-billing radio station. In 2003, WWTN and WSM-FM were sold to Cumulus Media for $65 million .
Programming
WWTN serves as the flagship station for the nationally syndicated weekday afternoon talk show hosted by Phil Valentine and also offers local programs on from weekdays mornings till early afternoons, hosted by Brian Wilson, Michael DelGiorno and Dan Mandis. The weekday evening schedule is provided by the Westwood One Network, a subsidiary of Cumulus Media: The Mark Levin Show, The Savage Nation with Michael Savage and Red Eye Radio. Weekends feature shows on money, health, real estate, cars, guns and computers, including syndicated shows from Kim Komando, Larry Kudlow and Bill Cunningham. Some weekend hours are paid brokered programming. At night and on weekends, most hours begin with world and national news from Westwood One News. In 1992, WWTN began airing a local show entitled The Money Game with Dave Ramsey, Hal Wilson, and Roy Matlock. Wilson and Matlock would leave the show at different points in its early history. With Ramsey hosting alone, his company assumed ownership of the program, which was renamed The Dave Ramsey Show in 1996 and was eventually independently syndicated to over 500 stations nationwide. WWTN served as the nominal flagship until 2012, when Ramsey moved the show to WPRT-FM in 2013, and then to WLAC in 2014.
