Faith the Music

While sifting through those dusty boxes a couple of years ago, Bradley began playing some of the songs and videos, capturing them on her phone, and posting them online.

“People were like, ‘Oh, that brings back so many memories,’ ” she recalled.

Bradley soon realized she had a meaningful musical time capsule at her disposal after church members started thanking her and reminiscing about the old days.

“They started saying things like, ‘Why can’t we hear music like that anymore?’ ” she said.

Bradley archived everything, uploading and saving the files in the audio/video section of her Facebook profile. She did not know the collection would continue to grow as other church members and friends started mailing her albums and tapes from churches throughout Tarrant County and beyond. Bradley even received CDs from a friend in Florida. Bradley also uses music from Stretch Productions, the recording business that she owns with her husband, Randy, which provides video documentation of church services and productions.

By the time Bradley and Roberts began co-hosting Come Praise the Lord, her collection had grown from about 100 albums to thousands.

Bradley’s whole life has involved serving at Sagamore Hill Baptist Church. As children in the 1970s, she and Roberts were in youth choir together, an experience that fostered their love of Christian music. Later on, she took a job producing audio and video for Sunday services. She even met Randy at church, after he took a paid internship and joined her production crew.

Telling the story of how she first heard him through her headphones one Sunday, a wide smile crossed her lips.

“I went, ‘He sounds really nice,’ ” she said, chuckling. Their three children were part of their church family before going on to start careers of their own.

When her love of worship and radio broadcasting came together in 2015, she knew it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Bradley’s father wasn’t the only media personality in the house. Her mother, Kitty Adkins, was a presenter for the children’s program Kittie’s Wonderland on NBC 5 in the early 1950s.

At the age of 5, Bradley took a small acting role in a local TV commercial. From then on, her father liked to tell people she was “bitten by the TV bug.”

“Mom and dad always said that that’s what did me in, that I had so much fun doing that,” she said, smiling at the memory.

Her first radio job came while she was a student at Abilene Christian University. At KRBC radio, she learned to operate soundboards and other broadcasting equipment. Bradley was exposed to all sorts of music, from country to hard rock. She spun vinyl records and rolled tape at the tiny station and developed an appreciation for rock ’n’ roll out of sheer self-preservation.

“You begin to love whatever music you’re listening to,” she said. “If you don’t, you’d go crazy.”

“Call Me” by Blondie, “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” by Billy Joel, and other pop hits of the day would never replace the spiritual music that Bradley held dearest. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Bradley worked at numerous stations, including at WBAP hosting the Midnight Cowboy Trucking Show during one of Bill Mack’s absences. Having finally made it to an up-market station, she was told by her superiors that she now needed to have a last name to go with the show. She decided on Bradley, to carry on her father’s legacy. In 1985, she worked in television and radio, dee-jaying with KSCS/96.3-FM by day and operating cameras at NBC 5 at night.

What made WBAP a good fit, she said, was its proximity to her home. But as her children started leaving for college, and as Stretch Productions became a full-time job, balancing a media career and a family business became too much to handle. In 2007, Bradley moved to a house near Keller. A commute to Fort Worth every day was the last thing she wanted.

Keller had no radio station to call its own. The absence of local stations –– and Bradley’s disinterest in commuting –– ultimately worked in her favor. That year, she got an offer to record San Antonio weather forecasts from her home and broadcast them on Dewberry Jam. The work wasn’t going to make her rich, but she enjoyed the flexible schedule, artistic outlet, and sense of fulfillment at letting people in Alamo City know that a storm or a sunny day was on the way. She did too good a job. Station owner Dewberry suggested that Bradley come up with an idea for her own show. He even sent her a small soundboard as an incentive.

“It was a Sony audio/visual board to get her started,” Dewberry said. “That’s how much faith I have in her.”

In North Texas, there are several gospel stations, including KLTY/94.9-FM in Arlington and KDKR/91.3-FM in Fort Worth, but what makes Come Praise the Lord unique is that its playlist is mostly local.

Bradley’s last foray into dee-jaying may have been nearly 20 years ago, but Dewberry’s insistence reignited her interest. Hosting her own show would allow her to utilize her hobby of music archiving, while enabling her return to the industry that she realized she’d been missing. That was all the convincing she needed.

That was when she decided to call an old friend.

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Bradley and Roberts had been friends for more than four decades and had worked together at WBAP 25 years earlier. In the summer of 2014, they had not seen each other in years when Bradley reached out to him.

“I’d done television for years,” Roberts said, “and I missed radio a little bit, and I said, ‘Sure.’ ”

He and Bradley had developed an easy, comfortable style of on-air patter while at WBAP, interacting smoothly and with a hint of humor. When that patter returned, the transition to co-hosting was a breeze.

“It had been a long time, and, you know, we never missed a beat,” he said

Their first show was broadcast on February 22, 2015. Bradley’s father did not live to hear it, having passed away the previous summer.

“He would have loved this,” said Bradley, whose mother is still alive and well –– and a fan of the show.

Bradley and Roberts come from similar backgrounds in media. Like Bradley, Roberts had experience in both radio and television, acting in commercials, and hosting Cooking with Class, a segment on cable access television newscasts in the early 2000s. The show featured weathercasters from local stations learning to cook at Dallas-area culinary schools. Roberts hosted for five years, and the show went on to win five Crystal Awards honoring excellence in cable access TV.

Getting theater experience in his late teens and early 20s helped him acclimate to a career in radio, he said. The performance aspect of broadcasting and the ease of communicating off-script were qualities he developed at that time.

“I still really enjoy that interaction with a live audience,” he said.

Roberts’ theatrical personality goes on full display every Sunday in the form of a “bit” in which he has a few minutes to tell anecdotes and jokes to make Bradley laugh.

“I enjoy getting her to laugh,” he said. “She never knows what I’m going to do.”

What makes a radio show, Roberts believes, is good music, news, weather, and, to keep listeners engaged, some humor.

“To me, the best medicine in the world is laughing, so I try to bring that to you,” he said.

On top of working in real estate, Roberts meets with Bradley twice a week to record Come Praise the Lord. Each show is roughly an hour long. Balancing his co-hosting duties with a busy work schedule was never problematic –– broadcasting is the creative outlet he needs in life.

“My artistic side is what fuels my ‘pay the bills’ side,” he said.

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