DJ Erica
If you want to hear a massive variety of Black music on local radio, including local artists’ tracks — or you just need a weekly dose of J Dilla while you get the lowdown on upcoming concerts — you know to tune in to Soul of the City, which currently airs in the drive-time slot from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays. Erica Hayes Schultz, better known as DJ Erica, has been bringing a laid-back blend of cool music and informative interviews focused on a Black Nashville audience to WXNA-FM since the community radio station launched in 2016.
The show began as a way for DJ Erica, an educator whose daughter was a preschooler at the time, to relieve some stress and ease back into grown-up hobbies by spinning songs from her neo-soul library. But her extensive previous radio experience made boosting community-focused conversations a natural fit.
“I would just get phone calls like, ‘Hey, we’re doing this event over in the Cameron area,’ or, ‘Hey, we’re doing the Nashville Black Market, can we come in?’” Schultz says, taking a seat in the office across the hall from WXNA’s broadcast studio at The Packing Plant. “And I was just wide-open to it. Because I know that 92Q and 101 [The Beat] — they don’t have the space to do it. Not like they don’t want to, they just don’t have the space. So I was like, ‘OK, let me be a resource.’”
DJ Erica’s passion for radio dates back to her childhood in suburban Atlanta. Her father had a long career with the U.S. Department of Labor, but went to historically black Morehouse College on a music scholarship and has never stopped being passionate about music. (They are also related to revered singer Roland Hayes.) She fell in love with broadcasting at University of Georgia student station WUOG circa 1992. She intended to study in the university’s renowned journalism school, but what she describes as a “party appetite” left her without the necessary GPA. She completed a history degree and focused on a path to becoming a teacher, but with frequent forays into radio and the music business.
While she studied for her master’s degree and teaching certifications, Schultz was part of a DJ collective called The Beat Collaborative. They spun in Atlanta clubs and hosted a suite of shows on powerful Georgia State student station WRAS that not only brought local electronica enthusiasts together but also helped spread sounds like drum ’n’ bass across the Southeast. When she and her family moved to Music City from California years later, her old friend Tim “Mindub” Hiber encouraged her to start a show on WXNA. (His only request was that she not pitch an electronica show, since that was his idea; later, she turned her Mode.Radio electronica podcast into a show that airs at midnight on Fridays.)
As Soul of the City heads toward its eighth year, Schultz wants to focus on mentoring marginalized people and showing them the power of amplifying their voices through radio. And she wants to see the platform of her program and the station as a whole keep growing.
“I come from a city where we’ve been creating our own stuff forever, and so I’m used to that. [Sometimes] in Nashville, we try to create, and then structures and systems kinda let us go only so far. And I would like my show to be a starting point.”
Photographed by Eric England at WXNA.
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