Explore WTJU history in t-shirts.
By Nathan Moore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?
The Beatles asked that question decades ago. When it comes to WTJU, we sure hope your answer is yes, because that day has arrived…
April 1, 2021 is WTJU’s 64th birthday!
Thanks for sticking with us all these years. To feed WTJU in our 64th year, please consider making a donation today.
To help celebrate WTJU’s 64th birthday, we’ve compiled a few past WTJU t-shirt designs for your viewing pleasure. It would be impossible to include all of our favorites, as there have been so many excellent WTJU shirts over the years. But here are a few. Click on each image for a larger version.
It may or may not have been WTJU’s first-ever t-shirt, but this 1972 shirt is the oldest one in our collection. Despite the image, hookahs are not a typical feature of our on-air studio. At least not these days.
WTJU’s Jazz department put together some especially cool shirt designs in the 1980s. The ones above are from 1981 and 1984. These were the early years of the WTJU Jazz Concert Series, founded by then-Jazz Director Steve Harris to bring jazz to Central Virginia. While that series ended some years ago, WTJU has co-presented hundreds of jazz events with the Charlottesville Jazz Society over the years.
If you’re wondering why these say “91.3 FM” instead of 91.1: WTJU moved one notch on the FM band in the early 1990s in order to increase our broadcast power.
In 1983, WTJU Rock came crashing through UVA’s Rotunda. That sounds about right.
In 1989, outsider musician Daniel Johnston designed our Rock Marathon shirt.
In 1991, WTJU Jazz marked the passing of Miles Davis with this two-sided shirt, with a literal interpretation of his piece “Blue in Green” from the Kind of Blue album.
WTJU first went on the air in 1957 from a studio in Old Cabell Hall, playing almost entirely classical music. WTJU’s classical department has carried on since. Forty hours per week, we continue to air selections from the gamut of classical works spaning mfore than five centuries.
For much of the 2000s-2010s, WTJU Classical took a break from printing new shirts. Fortunately, our classical shirts in the 1990s brought plenty of whimsy. I mean, who doesn’t want a shirt featuring an insect chamber group?
In the 1990s, WTJU’s Folk department became the last of our four present-day departments to be formally organized, under the leadership of Fred Boyce. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, WTJU aired weekly concerts from The Prism Coffeehouse, which was headed by Boyce at the time.
Musician, poet, and WTJU alum David Berman designed this front-and-back 1995 Rock Marathon shirt. Berman was the creative force behind The Silver Jews and later Purple Mountains. After his death in 2019, WTJU hosted a memorial celebration at our Ivy Road studios.
Steve Keene has a singular style and a singular reputation in the art world. He makes LOTS of paintings — hundreds of thousands — and sells them at six for $70 on his website. You don’t get to choose which designs, but you get to own six original paintings.
Steve has done more custom work for WTJU. He painted the guitars image above for our 1996 Rock Marathon. In 2015, WTJU Rock Director Nick Rubin asked if he could do another design. Steve sent us 40 of them. We chose our favorites for the Rock t-shirt. Per Steve’s request, we gave away the rest to donors that year.
These days, Jen Sorensen is a nationally-published political cartoonist, appearing regularly on Politico, DailyKos, AlterNet, C-Ville Weekly, and lots more. She’s also a friend and fan of WTJU since her years growing up in Charlottesville.
In 1994, she designed our Rock Marathon shirt documenting the travails of Fluffy, the cat who was a rock star. In 2019, she returned to the WTJU fold for another Rock Marathon shirt design. (Poster version pictured above.)
In recent years, WTJU has commissioned some astounding works of art for our marathon posters, which we have adapted into t-shirt designs.
Pictured above is the 2018 Rock Marathon poster, illustrated by Flamin’ Groovies frontman Cyril Jordan. Below is the 2020 Folk Marathon poster, created by then-UVA student Emma Scales, which recently won a national “Best Station Poster” award from Intercollegiate Broadcasting System.
