A Face In The Crowd
Joe Williams, the voice of Nashville motor sports, didn’t originally aspire to be an announcer when he was growing up in East Nashville. “I was going to be the youngest ever U.S. president in the year 2000,” Joe says. So maybe if Joe’s principal at East Nashville High School hadn’t sent him over to WQQK-92.1 FM (92Q) to represent East for an interview segment with local school kids, Al Gore’s monotone might now be the voice at the Nashville Superspeedway. Thankfully, Joe caught the broadcasting bug in 1982, and speedway fans have enjoyed his mellifluous baritone (sprinkled with cigarettes and Mountain Dew) booming across the Tennessee State Fairgrounds and now the superspeedway in Lebanon ever since. But racing wasn’t necessarily Joe’s first choice of sport. As a young sports talk host with WMAK-1300 AM, Joe tried arranging live pre-game reports and interviews with the Nashville Sounds. A team official told him, “We have no need for a 5000-watt radio station with a rookie child reporter.” With racing the only other game in town at the time, Joe pursued sound bites and opportunities to broadcast from the motor speedway. Motor sports became his passion, including a three-race stint behind the wheel in 1985 that ended with a week in the hospital. Fortunately for Joe, his wife shares his love of racing. He met Becky on a blind date one rainout Saturday night, and a year later he proposed to her on top of the fairgrounds grandstand. Today, she helps him with ideas for entertaining the crowd, which often means her driving the pace car. As it turns out, Joe’s passion is more of an avocation. He actually earns his living as the solid waste director for the city of Franklin. “Gentlemen, haul your Dumpsters!”
— Jonathan Harwell Jr.
