By Lukas Myers
Staff Writer
SPRINGFIELD — Chemistry teacher by day and radio show host by night, Jennifer Ramm does the impossible. She pursues both of her passions side by side every week.
On one hand, Ramm is a full-time faculty member at LLCC, where she teaches chemistry. On the other hand, she takes the reins every week to host her radio show Bluegrass Breakdown for National Public Radio Illinois at the radio station found on the University of Illinois at Springfield campus.
The show airs 6 to 8 p.m. Sundays at 91.9 FM.
Ramm is a passionate player of music. A classically trained violinist, she also plays fiddle in her own bluegrass band called River Ramblers in which she also sings. She spends much of her time listening to and playing bluegrass music. But it was not always that way.
Ramm says that, being from closer to Chicago, she did not have much exposure to bluegrass; a traditionally Appalachian and Southern music style. It was not until her parents stumbled, quite by accident, into a bluegrass festival one day; their lives would never be the same. After that day they were avid blue grass listeners.
“They just fell in love with it,” says Ramm who has been hosting the show for close to fifteen years now.
After this discovery Ramm always had one ear on the radio. She even went as far as to make friends with a bluegrass radio station nearby when she went to college to get her MS in Organic Chemistry.
As soon as she graduated she got the job here at LLCC and she immediately met the people who used to run bluegrass breakdown and only seven years after she got her job at LLCC she started hosting the radio show.
Now she had a whole new problem in front of her; a radio show to host, and absolutely zero experience in communications, “The only radio rule I knew about when I got here was basically: don’t curse.”
After getting past the initial host of nerves she found that it was a pretty natural thing for her.
“I try to view it as having a conversation with someone; one on one. Rather than seeing it like I am announcing to however many thousands of people might be listening,” said Ramm about her process.
Ramm is extremely passionate about both sciences and music. She does not ever really see how the sciences, so often viewed as cold and calculating, ever oppose the soft tenderness of music. She loves both equally and for different reasons.
Ramm’s band has recorded four full length albums of mainly covers that can be picked up at any of their shows. They play frequently in the area and have gone as far as Michigan and Kentucky to play in bluegrass festivals, some of which she attended as a child.
“It was really cool to get to see things from the other side,” says Ramm reminiscing on her time at the Charlotte Bluegrass Festival, a festival that she has frequented in the past. They have played all over the Midwest and can be found near the Springfield area occasionally. They have a show in Virginia, Illinois on June 5 this summer.
When working with students her favorite thing is always that she loves to see the “light bulb moments” when a student finally grasps a concept or understands something for the first time.
Ramm also says that her favorite thing in radio is finding a new artist in when she’s researching or just seeking out new material, it’s like her own individual “light bulb moment”.
Lukas Myers can be reached at [email protected].
