WRSI Host Jim Olsen Invites us to His Back Porch
By Melissa Karen Sances | Photos by Nikki Gardner Photography
Published In Northampton Living | March 2026
Music to Our Ears
Growing up in Long Island in the 1960’s, Jim Olsen was mesmerized by music. When he was six years old, the Beatles landed at New York’s Kennedy Airport, launching “Beatlemania” in America and overtaking the airwaves. At night, Olsen tucked himself into bed with a transistor radio, which he held up to his ear, navigating the dial in the dark with his thumb, chasing the frequency that would transform crackling static into one clear note – and then a song.
Now WRSI The River’s beloved “Back Porch Radio” host and the man behind Northampton’s Back Porch Festival, Olsen’s nearly 50-year career has unfolded, significant step by significant step, thanks to his careful attunement to music.
“My parents had great doubts about my career path,” said Olsen, now 68 and also the president of Signature Sounds, a record label in Northampton that launched the careers of Lake Street Dive and Josh Ritter.
But he knew in college that he had found his calling. At Ithaca, where he studied health care administration, his best friend worked at the school’s radio station. “When I found out that all you had to do is go to a training and you could have your own radio show, that was it for me,” said Olsen with a laugh. Between his junior and senior years, he landed his first job as a deejay.
While working at a station in New Hampshire after college, Olsen tuned in to WRSI, which was then broadcasting from Greenfield. (The station moved to Northampton in 1998.) “In many ways it was more of a college radio station than my college radio station was,” he said, noting that “some of it was brilliant and some of it was terrible.” His interest was piqued, and after he was hired in 1984 he was soon named the company’s program director. “I made this road map that the station continues to follow today,” he said, his voice tinged with wonder.
A recurring theme in his story is that his influence goes on to have a life of its own.
In 1986, for WRSI’s fifth birthday, the station wanted to hold a party. “One of us suggested, ‘Why don’t we do a little festival that would be free for our listeners?’” Olsen recalled. By 1999 that “little festival” had become Green River Fest, now an annual, weekend-long celebration attended by 15,000 people. (Olsen was the Festival Director from 2013 to 2023, when DSP Shows took over booking.)
The origin of Signature Sounds is equally quirky. While on the air in 1991, Olsen got a call from a listener who worked for Calvin Klein. The caller loved WRSI’s music so much that he wanted Olsen to curate playlists for his stores. At the time, playlists were made on cassette tapes, and Olsen needed someone to duplicate them. While rifling through the phonebook, he found Signature Sounds Recording Studio in Palmer, where Mark Thayer answered the phone. Long story short: After getting his cassettes, Olsen and Thayer teamed up with another WRSI personality, Johnny Memphis, who hosted the "Homegrown" show. The three made two “Homegrown” compilation CDs of local artists together, then Olsen and Thayer co-founded the Signature Sounds record label in 1995.
In the past 30 years, the business has released more than 200 albums and has worked with dozens of artists including Chris Smither, Lori McKenna, Allison Russell and Aoife O'Donovan, who won a Grammy Award in 2020 for Best American Roots Song.
While Olsen left the station full-time to build his label, he remained on Sundays to host his Back Porch Radio show starting in 1993. The name invokes a “laid-back image of a bunch of musicians playing on a porch and having fun," he explained. Every week, he carries a sticker-covered blue leather suitcase to the studio, a tribute to his tastes bursting with CDs that could influence that morning’s line-up. He also integrates Spotify tunes to create a weekly show defined by American Roots music.
“There’s something about doing it on Sunday morning that is vaguely spiritual,” he said. “It’s the one time of the week where everybody’s a little off-routine. You’re not rushing off to work, you don’t have school, maybe you’re lingering over breakfast, or reading the Sunday paper on your laptop. It tends to be a slower time, and I love being the soundtrack to that.”
In 2015 Signature Sounds held a one-night festival at the Academy of Music. The next year, it grew into two. Now what’s known as the Back Porch Festival is a weekend-long event featuring 60 acts at multiple venues in Northampton. This year’s festival will run from March 27 to 29. (Learn more at backporchfest.com.)
Olsen doesn’t see himself slowing down anytime soon. “I’m at my happiest when I’m close to the music,” he said.
When I wondered aloud what that little boy with his warbly radio would think of where Olsen ended up, he didn’t hesitate:
“He would be in disbelief.”
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