[1] The two brothers had acquired a discarded transmitter from a Nashville station in exchange for five barrels of oil[3] and were counseled by a family friend not to go into the radio business, warning that they would bankrupt their father, a former state senator.
[4] The first advertiser on the station was a barter deal: it was a man who had volunteered to help haul the transmitter from Nashville, where it was in an auto supply store, to Springfield.
[15] WSIX's long-running association with WLW evolved in September 1939, when the station became an affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System alongside outlets in Louisville and Lexington.
[17] Firmly entrenched as Nashville's third radio station, WSIX applied in December 1940 to move its transmitter to a site at Buena Vista Pike and Moorman's Arm Road—later changed to a facility on McGavock Pike—change frequencies to 980 kHz, and increase power to 5,000 watts day and 1,000 night.
[19] In the meantime, the station suffered through a one-day dispute with the local musicians' union that saw Mutual stop feeding music programs to WSIX.
WSIX-TV channel 8, also an ABC affiliate, began broadcasting November 29, 1953 as the second television station in the city, using the former FM outlet's tower.
[25][4] WSIX would return to FM in October 1959 with the launch of WSIX-FM, which broadcast briefly on 97.5 before moving within months to its present frequency of 97.9 MHz.
[26] In 1961, the Draughons bought a parcel of land on Murfreesboro Pike to consolidate the radio stations, still in the Nashville Trust Building, and WSIX-TV, which had operated from a site on Old Hickory Boulevard.
[32] GE first floated the sale of its Nashville operations in 1979 as part of divestitures required for its proposed merger with Cox Broadcasting, which ultimately collapsed.
[35] In December 1990, Capstar sold the station to the Bible Broadcasting Network for $600,000;[36] while the sale remained pending, WSIX AM simulcast the FM.