WSPA 950 AM signed on the air on February 17, 1930, as South Carolina's first radio station,[2] beating out WCSC in Charleston and WIS in Columbia by several months.
[citation needed] Programming was mostly local, but national shows included those of Gene Autry, Fats Waller and Wayne King.
[2] In 1944 the FCC ordered the WSPA-WORD combo to be broken up due to ownership regulations which forbid an owner from having no more than one AM station per market.
It was settled in 1958 when Spartan Radiocasting bought back WSPA and WSPA-FM from Liberty Life Insurance and spinning off WORD and their FM sister WDXY 100.5 to different ownership.
[2] In 2002, Entercom (then owners of WORD/WYRD) swapped WORD's programming and call letters from 910 AM over to its newly acquired sister, WSPA's signal at 950 AM to gain better coverage.
On March 15, 2024, Norsan Media - the parent company of WOLI (AM) - bought WSPA-FM 106.3 as part of Audacy's exit plan from chapter 11 bankruptcy after it was placed under a divestiture trust, for $700,000.