If you’ve ever listened to public radio in South Carolina, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the soothing voice of Jeanette Guinn, host of Arts Daily and visiting assistant professor of arts management in the College’s School of the Arts.
Jeanette Guinn at home on the air. Photo credit: Meredith Wohl.
Now in its seventeenth year, the program airs multiple times each week on ETV Radio. The segments are as familiar to Palmetto State radio listeners as car dealership commercials and tests of the emergency broadcast system.
For art lovers, there’s a double-dose of Guinn each summer, as she also hosts ETV’s Spoleto Today, a radio program featuring interviews with artists and performers from Spoleto Festival USA and Piccolo Spoleto. The show coincides with the festival’s run through June 7, 2015.
She researches, writes, records and engineers all of the Arts Daily segments, which air during popular National Public Radio programs such as All Things Considered and Morning Edition. On any given day her voice might reach hundreds of thousands of people. That’s a lot of ears.
Her methodology for selecting events and performances to highlight on the program is straightforward: She looks for interesting things that capture her attention and represent different areas of the state.
“I look for things I want to go to,” she says. “I’m an omnivore in terms of the arts. I’m really open to lots of different kinds of stuff.”
SC ETV’s Arts Daily has ben hosted by Jeanette Guinn since 1998.
Guinn honed her radio chops as an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina, where she hosted a program on WUSC Radio in the early 1980s called Little Debbie and the Armed Robbers. She spun vinyl records, mostly new wave, during the coveted Friday afternoon time slot.
College radio affirmed her love of music and sounds. “I have loved sound my whole life. And I love music,” she says. “The way things sound is very important to me.”
She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in music, with an emphasis in theory and composition, and then a master’s degree in media arts.
Her first job was working for the South Carolina Arts Commission in Columbia. At the time, the commission’s director was Scott Shanklin-Peterson, a senior fellow and former director of the arts management program.
Jeanette Guinn is the host of Spoleto Today on ETV Radio.
Guinn spent 25 years with the commission in a variety of roles, including stints as director of performing and presenting and director of special projects. In 2005, she began teaching as an adjunct in the College’s arts management program while still working at the commission. She moved to the College full-time as a visiting professor in 2010.
But she did not want to leave behind her Arts Daily program, so the College made arrangements to support Guinn’s continued service as host. For the past decade, she has made weekly or bi-weekly treks to Columbia to record and produce Arts Daily.
With her background in arts and radio, Guinn was a natural pick to join Marcus Overton in co-hosting Spoleto Today. Overton, the program’s creator and a former executive director of the festival, recently retired and handed over the reins to Guinn.
Listen to the audio clip below of Jeanette Guinn interviewing CofC theater professor Joy Vandervort-Cobb on Spoleto Today.
Spoleto Today also has provided a valuable platform for Guinn to teach students about radio broadcasting. She created a Maymester class to provide students with real-world skills. They assist with all aspects of the program’s production, from research and booking to recording and editing.
Watch a video below about Guinn’s Maymester course Arts and the Media at Spoleto.
This year, Guinn served as moderator of Spoleto Salon, a new series of talks about activities behind-the-scenes of the festival.
Even with her many radio-related duties, Guinn still manages to be one of the most beloved professors on campus. Her colleagues and students adore her. Her office walls are lined with notes, art and other objects from admiring students. She advises about 60 arts management majors and also serves on the Cistern Yard Media Board for student media.
Having been on the airwaves for the better part of two decades, Guinn is often recognized by her name or voice. Her calming, confident and whimsical voice is so recognizable that strangers sometimes know who she is the moment she opens her mouth. She recently left a voice message for a man selling a used car, and the seller knew it was Guinn before she said her name.
Jeanette Guinn
For someone who identifies herself as a serious introvert, Guinn says these encounters can be awkward and jarring. “Sometimes it’s creepy and weird and sometimes it’s really sweet.”
But it’s all part of the job. And it’s a job she loves. She sees herself as a connector. “I just adore the opportunity to introduce great artists to an audience, and I adore collecting an audience for great artists.”
She’s particularly interested in the artistic process – how and why her guests make their art. Sometimes her guests drop a one-liner that momentarily takes her breath away:
“I sing to heal the world,” mezzosoprano Barbara Dever once said.
Lemon Andersen, a poet who served time in prison, said, “Poetry saved my life.”
Guinn’s favorite quote, and one that many of her students can recite from memory, is from theater performer Taylor Mac: “You can’t ask permission to be an artist.”
There are many more great lines, collected over the years in hundreds of conversations over the public airwaves, says Guinn. “The others are tattooed on my heart.”
