Photo courtesy of WAMU.

Sad news from WAMU today with the announcement that the public radio station’s longtime bluegrass DJ, Jerry Gray, died Thursday at his home in Virginia. In an obituary, the City Paper reports that Gray, whose real name was Gerald Poulsen, died of complications from a heart transplant operation he underwent in 1989. He was 78.

Poulsen spent 30 years at WAMU, retiring in 2001 after a career hosting The Jerry Gray Show, a daily program on which he spun traditional and modern bluegrass, along with a weekend show that featured country and western music.

From the City Paper’s obituary:

Music became one of Poulsen’s passions thanks to his love of [Connie B.] Gay’s radio show, and also because of his mother’s roots in Virginia’s Northern Neck region. According to his son, Poulsen admired that area’s populace and its preferred musical styles, like bluegrass. “These people were honest and hard-working,” Mark Poulsen said. “That’s what he associated the music with. That’s the audience he envisioned playing music for.”

Poulsen attended American University, and also studied at a private radio academy, according to an obituary in The Washington Post. There, he first started using the name Jerry Gray, Poulsen’s son said, because the school taught would-be radio personalities to assume memorable on-air names.

…

“Everybody liked Jerry,” said Ed Walker, who first met Poulsen when the two worked on fundraising at WAMU in the 1970s. Walker still works at WAMU, playing vintage radio programs on Sunday nights. “He was a nice person, that’s it. He was a very knowledgeable personality; he knew his subject.”