After 26 years as one of Nashville’s most respected country record promotion execs, Dale Turner has returned to his first career as a radio air personality. He’s now hosting mornings at country WDKN Dickson, Tenn., just outside of Nashville, and having the time of his life.

“It’s one of the oldest AMs in the state of Tennessee, and it’s a real hometown, small town approach to programming, which is really refreshing to me,” says Turner, who’s been hosting the 6-10 a.m. show live each weekday since mid-January.

For his show, that small town approach means not just local traffic and weather, but also reading funeral notices on the air at 6 a.m., something he’s never done before, even during the 15 years he spent in radio prior to embarking on his distinguished record promotion career. When he signs off the air at 10, Turner is followed on the AM station by a local swap and shop show, another staple of small town radio.

“This is not a consulted station. This is not a researched station. It’s just a local, small market operation that I think is doing a really good job,” Turner adds.

“What’s great about it is they’ve just given me an open canvas to create a fun, local morning radio show,” he continues. “I do stuff like ‘birthday club,’ and ‘this day in country music history.’” After 9 a.m., he also sometimes features the music of one artist for a half hour segment, and between the records he’ll share stories from his own experience working with artists like Ronnie Milsap, Clint Black, Dolly Parton, Martina McBride, Restless Heart, Keith Whitley and Rascal Flatts from his time as an executive at RCA Records and then Disney’s Lyric Street Records.

“It’s been a real thrill to kind of break the format, which they encourage me to do because they know they hired somebody who spent 26 years working with artists and touring with them,” says Turner. “They just allow me that time to stop and tell stories and feature certain artists.”

With country star and Dickson native Craig Morgan releasing a new album later this month, the station will be involved in helping promote it, staging a concert at a local venue, as well as doing product giveaways and possibly some on-air special programming.

Says Turner, “That’s one of the things we’ll do to make the station a little more high profile.”

Turner’s earlier, 15-year radio career was spent entirely in country, and included stops at KSSN Little Rock, Ark.; WMC Memphis; WSAI Cincinnati; WKDA Nashville; KITY San Antonio; and WTHI Terre Haute, Ind. A lengthy record career followed, and Turner says there are a few things he learned on the record side that he’s now applying to his new radio job.

“The biggest thing I’m applying now that I’m back in radio is all those focus groups that [former Sony Music Nashville chairman] Joe Galante had us do,” he says. “I remember really vividly where we would do these focus groups in different cities and they all said the same thing: radio DJs should announce the artist and song titles more.

“I made a silent pact to myself that if I ever got back into radio, and I had any control over the programming of my show, I would make sure I announced every song that I played,” Turner says. “If it’s a live and local radio station, people want to hear the DJ tell them what they’re listening to. I made it a point here, even if I play two songs back to back, I will always identify the song, even if it’s 20 years old.”

He admits there was one big hurdle to overcome when he first took over the morning show. The last time Turner had worked in radio—in 1984—stations had just begun installing sliding pot control boards in their studios. Now, he says, even at a small market station like WDKN there’s a state of the art NextGen hard drive computer system that controls everything, and Turner had to learn it from scratch.

“I used to do carts for commercials, and CDs for the [music],” he says with a laugh. Now, “you run the whole studio by a mouse. It’s unbelievable. I really never noticed all those years when I was out of radio how the technology had changed and taken over. There’s no more index cards in front of the microphone. Now, you click online to get the weather, to download the traffic reports, and for your sports scores. Commercials, music, promos, everything is just one click away on the screen as you work your way through the hour-by-hour program. It’s all so foreign to me.

“I learned pretty quickly all the mechanics, but it still blows my mind that there’s not one thing that resembles the radio control room I knew back in the ’80s.”

In an ironic twist, Turner is now working for the owner who outbid him when he and a few partners tried to buy the station three years ago, while he was still working at Lyric Street. Since then, the owner, Kenneth Forte, has added an FM station to the mix, and the two stations simulcast for much of the day, including Turner’s morning show. That will all change in the next few months, as plans call for the stations to split their programming apart. New station PD Zak Becker will host mornings on the FM, and Turner will remain on the AM.

Turner says the FM will be a “music intensive, very aggressive modern, contemporary country station.” The AM will take a more traditional country route with block programming, including the swap and shop and a noontime local news segment, as well as a lot of local high school sports.

The offer to work there came about when Turner happened to be in Dickson and decided to stop into the station and introduce himself to Forte. That conversation turned into an opportunity to host a two or three hour weekly classic country show, which Turner accepted thinking it would be fun. But just a few days later, Forte upped his offer to mornings.

In his spare time, Turner is beginning work on a book about his experiences on both sides of the business, with the working title “Turner’s Big Radio and Record Adventure.” Now, with his new job at WDKN, he’ll be able to add a whole new chapter to his story.

“I’m having fun,” he says of his new gig. “It’s something I want to do, not something I have to do at this point in my life. My first love has always been radio. So for me to be able to come back full circle has been a real blessing for me. I’m just having a great time.”