Each week, the Shreveport-Bossier Journal’s Tony Taglavore takes to lunch a local person – someone who is well-known, successful, and/or influential, and asks, “What’s Your Story?”
By TONY TAGLAVORE, Journal Services
Saturday. Late afternoon. A beautiful time for a wedding.
On this Saturday, the bride, in all her beauty, would soon walk down the aisle, ready to marry the man of her dreams.
Music would play throughout the venue – during the ceremony and reception – adding to the day of which dreams are made.
Or would it?
“The wedding started in 30 minutes and there was one cable I didn’t have. I left it at the house.”
That one cable would connect the DJ’s turntable to his laptop. Kinda important.
“Without this cable, I cannot do anything.”
Except run back home and grab it or go to Best Buy and get one. Oh wait. The wedding was “out in the middle of nowhere,” almost an hour from civilization.
Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick.
“The wedding venue person asked me if everything was okay. It’s now 10 minutes before the wedding starts. ‘Do you have a printer anywhere in this building?’ She took me to a storage closet. There’s junk everywhere. Under the rubble, there’s a printer. She said, ‘I don’t know why you need a printer.’”
But he knew.
“On the back of that printer was a cable which was the exact one I needed. I just took the cable from the back of this junk printer and was able to connect my turntable, and everything worked fine.”
Never let ‘em see you sweat.
“No one besides me knew I was in total chaos for 30 minutes and sweating profusely . . . It was like my gut falling through my stomach. That’s probably the only time my gut has dropped completely.”
Now 33 years old, Shreveport’s Jay Whatley is one of our area’s most tenured, well-known event hosts. Jay told me that story, and his story, during lunch at a place he chose, Gullo’s Fresh Produce & Bake Shop. Jay enjoyed a double cheeseburger with ketchup only (no lettuce, tomato, etc.), and a Sprite to drink. I had a chicken salad sandwich, a side salad, and water with lemon.
“In all these years (Jay has worked more than 900 weddings), I’ve never really had an issue that was so bad, the bride and groom noticed. I think that’s a big win.”
Jay’s been winning since he was a sophomore at Evangel Christian Academy. Rap songs he wrote about a rival school caught the attention of a local radio personality. Before long, Jay was part of a station’s morning show team.
“They would send me to do funny things on the street at 7 am. The station was on the same road as Evangel. I would get done around 7:45 or eight and go to school.”
At 16, Jay was being asked to play music at weddings.
“I said ‘No’ to about 50 people before I said, ‘What are you saying ‘No’ for? Buy some speakers and learn how to do it.”
He did.
“The first wedding was beautiful. It was emotional, and I’m a little bit of a sucker when it comes to lovey- dovey, emotional-type stuff. I just loved the business really early.”
After graduation, (he was once suspended from school three days for talking too much), Jay landed a radio job in Destin, Florida. But after eight months – including one week of college in Panama City Beach – Jay found that summer-Destin and winter-Destin are two different places. So, he came back to Shreveport and began an on-air run of 17-and-a-half years. That run ended last December when Jay was laid off.
“If anything, I’m devastated on a personal level because I love radio so much. I’ve done radio for over half my life. Half my life has been spent talking four hours in a small room to the community I love and grew up with.”
But Jay isn’t without work. He still plays music for weddings. He plays country and Top 40 songs on weekends at a Bossier City nightclub. Jay goes home around 2 am, which is a lot earlier than when he worked at another club until sun-up.
“It’s very easy to get burned out with nightclubs. The schedule is brutal. I feel like I’m 90 years old every Sunday when I wake up.”
Jay also hosts two podcasts, including one with the mother of his 10-and 12-year-old daughters (Jay has never been married). And when he isn’t at one of those jobs, Jay is working the one job he says he “loves.” For 16 years – since he was 17 – Jay has been the in-arena host for what he figures to be around 500 Shreveport Mudbugs hockey games.
“Last year, this one guy, an older guy who had been drinking a little bit, said, ‘Man, you did such a great job tonight. I had not been to a game in a long time. The last time I came to a game, they had a little kid doing your job. Just a little kid out there. You’re way better than he was.’ I never told him that was me.”
Growing up, Jay certainly could not have predicted his popularity. One of two children, he was born to a single mother. She knew what he didn’t have, even if he didn’t.
“If you asked me, I had the greatest childhood ever. If you ask my mom, I had the worst childhood ever. I loved it. We lived in trailer parks growing up . . . We didn’t have much, but from my perspective, it was fine. We didn’t have much of anything, but we got by. My mom worked a hundred jobs and just kind of got us all through it.
Jay spent some time with his father, but as Jay grew, so did the distance between them.
“My mom tells the story of when I graduated high school and walked across the stage. My dad told me he was going to come. I remember that meaning a lot to me that my dad would do that.”
Except, he didn’t.
“I show up to graduation, walk across the stage, and look out. It was like right out of a movie. There was one empty seat right next to my mom and my grandparents. That’s probably the one time I can remember being disappointed.”
(Jay told me he and his father have recently reconnected).
Jay played saxophone in middle school, though he wasn’t particularly into the sound of music. Jay was more about how music was made.
“When I bought my first turntable, I sat in my house for seven or eight hours at a time just messing with it. Figuring out a cooler way to do what everyone else was doing. How do you take five songs and make it sound like they’re all happening at once? I spent an incredible amount of time when no one was listening except the mother of my children, who asked me for three hours to stop.”
But the soundtrack of Jay’s life hasn’t always been upbeat.
“I didn’t have anything as a kid. There’s no telling how many forks on the road my life could have taken. If I didn’t have anything to eat, I was still positive. I was going to eat tomorrow. I was going to eat the next day. If I would go to school and half my foot was hanging out of my shoe because that was the only pair of shoes I had, I always persevered.”
A few years ago when he and his children’s mother went their separate ways, Jay was clinically diagnosed with depression.
“I went a couple of years where I just couldn’t get out of it. That was incredibly tough considering my job. Every day, I had to be the happiest guy in the room. I had to uplift other people who maybe were going through some negative stuff . . . Working 12 hours a day is really easy when you come home to two kids who are excited to see you. Then all of the sudden, they weren’t there. It was hard, that period of my life. There was a good six or seven months where I just wasn’t going to get out of it. There was no way.”
But there’s always a way, which is the message Jay delivered when I asked my final question. As always, what is it about his life that might be inspiring to others?
“There’s nothing you’re going through that is impossible to overcome. That’s so cliché, but so true. It feels like it’s impossible to overcome because it’s your world and you’re going through it, and no one else understands what you’re going through. But the truth is, you’ve just got to keep pushing through it. Eventually, you will get on the other side of it, and you will be thankful you stuck around to see it.”
Now that’s music to anyone’s ears.
Do you know someone with a story? Email SBJTonyT@gmail.com.
The Journal’s weekly “What’s Your Story?” series is sponsored by Morris & Dewett Injury Lawyers.