Hound of Music

Audio slave Robert Aubry Davis has heard it all

By Buzz McClain

There was the time he was waiting for the very tardy carilloneur of the Utrecht Cathedral on the Singel Canal in Amsterdam when the copious libations of the Belgian Beer Bar caught up with him, rendering him nearly incapable of saying, on the air no less, the phrase “Dutch culture” or pronouncing the composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s name. The memory haunts him to this day.

Then there was the time Richard Nixon’s fascist henchmen strip searched him—strip searched, mind you—at the opening of the Kennedy Center—on his birthday no less—and told him to not just immediately leave the premises but to vacate Washington, D.C., forever if he knew what was good for him—him, an eighth-generation Washingtonian—and all he was guilty of was having long hair…

Then there was the time…
And so it goes, all afternoon, one story after the other, told with wit and flair by the dazzlingly erudite raconteur Robert Aubry Davis. His mellifluous voice and outsized on-air persona (you get the impression he knows everything about anything, and pronounces it properly) isn’t an act, it’s just the way he is. He embodies a “metaphysical eclectic” curiosity, a passion for the arts, and gifts of total audio and visual recall.
As for the imposing triptych moniker, bear in mind that Davis began his career as just “Bob,” which is inconceivable these days. “Bob” could hardly transport us as transcendently as someone named Robert Aubry. Besides, there already was a Bob Davis on local airwaves when young Robert returned to his hometown after sojourning up and down the dial in the South.

“When I came to WGMS-FM, there was already the well-known Bob Davis” at that station, Robert Aubry Davis said, adding that union rules prevent the use of identical or similar names. “Bob, who was and is a kind and helpful professional, knowing that I really wanted to keep some of my real name, agreed to allow the waiver of similar name-ness with the use of my full name,” giving rise to Robert Aubry Davis, his glissando of a professional handle.

“To many it seems horribly pretentious,” he admitted, acknowledging comical variations, including “Robbery Aubry Dobbry, Robert Davy Hubris and, in an allusion to my size, Robert Avoirdupois Davis.”

From WGMS Davis went to WETA, where last year he celebrated his 30th anniversary at the Arlington public television and radio broadcast house. He continues, 25 years later, as host of WETA-TV’s “Around Town.” He started at the station in 1978—on his birthday, but not the Nixonian one—after his bouts with Atlanta’s WGKA-AM (the program director threw a knife at him, long story) and Jacksonville, Fla.’s WYZE-AM, WJCT-FM and WCGL-AM.

Davis survived the Sirius-XM shakeup nearly unscathed. He’s still on the air weeknights from midnight to 6 a.m. on “Symphony Hall” (Sirius channel 80, XM’s 78), and weekend programs–but lost his labor of love Vox, the all-vocal channel. And he’ll continue The Village, a folk-music channel he created for XM.

The 59-year-old is on the air 12 hours a day, more than 100 hours a week, thanks to “voice tracking,” which permits him to record his enlightening patter at one time and have it dropped in later between the musical selections. “I broadcast more early music than anyone who has ever lived,” he said. It’s not bragging; it’s just the way it is.

As of yet he hasn’t heard if he’s going to continue at the newly merged Sirius XM Radio or if he’ll be let go in favor of his counterparts. No matter what happens, he’ll still have “Millennium of Music,” a program of early music he started in 1975 and is heard each week on some 150 stations around the country (including stations in Winchester, Charlottesville, Harrisonburg and Farmville, among others in Virginia). His RADMAN Productions, founded in 1995, produces programming for public radio. And he also has “a big European presence,” he said, thanks to “very lively early-music scenes” overseas. Consequently, he’s been knighted by both France and Belgium.

Of late Davis has been easing into the role of something emeritus, hanging up his formerly ubiquitous tuxedo in favor of hiking boots. “I don’t do black-tie galas anymore,” he said over coffee at Stonecroft, his historic, stone-encrusted 1926 cottage (and former Depression-era speakeasy) in Silver Spring, Md. “They’re just no fun. What people don’t see is that I am an introvert who looks like an extrovert.

“Since I am immersed in this city and its culture, I spend other moments outside,” he said. “My wife and I are dedicated … nature lovers.”

Time off finds him with attorney wife Patricia A. Brannan (a photo of her pleading a case at the Supreme Court hangs on the wall) or at their cabin in the Shenandoah foothills.

As for retirement, “Eh, not happening,” he said. “I’m not the type. But in a more emeritus status I would focus on the international cultural work I do, pop out a book or two—I started as a writer—but I expect to record my last ‘Millennium of Music’ program on my deathbed.”

Davis spends his days playing classical and folk music, but several times a week he can be found at opening performances of the region’s theaters. Theater, he said, “is our era’s greatest contribution to art.” He believes in contemporary theater so much that he envisions a day when even the profane and irreverent British musical “Jerry Springer: The Opera” will be performed in revival, an indication of its staying power. “It’s groundbreaking, and it’s truly an opera,” he said of “Springer.”

Venues seem to have Davis on a permanent guest list. Ask him about the last live music show he actually paid to see, and he replies, “the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Cellar Door,” probably in 1971.

Ask him what’s on his iPod that no one would expect—a good question for an eclectic, we thought—and you get an unexpected screed: “I am profoundly anti-iPod. The average number of cuts downloaded is 300, less than you would get if you spent time listening actively to a variety of local radio stations—and a tiny fraction of what is available on XM.

“The point of music—or, indeed, any art form—is not to find a few things you may like and lock the door to any other experience. But, as [English broadcaster and art historian] Kenneth Clark said, use any one thing you like to be the golden thread that links you to the next, and the next and the next after that. Soon all music, indeed all culture, will be spread before you in a vast feast that honors you, your sense, your inner being, as well as honoring all those creators who came before, who so wanted to reach out and touch you uniquely.

“We have become a culture of narrowcasts and exclusion, to our profound detriment.”

And he’s right. Of course. Again. It’s just the way it is.

(January 2008)

Tags: Entertainment, People, radio, Robert Aubry Davis, Studio