Claudia Marshall

Your WFUV wake-up call on weekday mornings (6-10am) is the voice of a music and news veteran.

Songwriting? Broadcasting? Both!

Claudia Marshall

Though she started her broadcasting career as a news reporter, FUV morning host Claudia Marshall is a music lover at heart - she's from Motown, after all.

"There was always music in the house," Marshall remembers of her childhood in metro Detroit, where her mother was a semi-professional singer and her father and brother amateur musicians. Marshall herself played piano, guitar, harmonica and flute, and even majored in music at Western Michigan State University before discovering the campus radio station, where she worked as a student. "That changed everything," she recalls. "I really liked being on the air, and switched my major from music to broadcasting."

The day after graduation, Marshall packed up her Ford Escort and drove to Los Angeles in pursuit of a journalism career. She soon found it at all-news station KFWB, where she worked her way up from copywriter to newscaster before going on to a gig at L.A.'s top-rated oldies station, KRTH. In 1995, after a stint as a television reporter and a move to Portland, Ore., Marshall was lured to New York by CBS News. She spent the next five years reporting and anchoring national radio broadcasts there and at ABC News.

Soon after arriving in New York Marshall discovered WFUV and became an enthusiastic member. "I kept dialing around on my clock radio, and there was nothing good on. Not one good song," she recalls. "But then I stumbled on 'FUV and heard 'Open Arms' by Patty Larkin, and I'd never heard anything like it. I mean, nobody else was playing this stuff - and certainly not mixing it up in this cool way!"

A few years later, Marshall decided WFUV might be a fun place to work and contacted program director Chuck Singleton. "After a lot of long talks, we came up with this idea of an information-intensive show that would allow me to use both my background in journalism and my love of music," she explains. Thus, the morning show was born in the winter of 2001.

Marshall, who says her instincts about working at WFUV were right, enjoys meeting "our great listeners" at local concert venues and interviewing her musical heroes on the air. She lives in Rockland County with her husband, two stepdaughters and a yellow lab. When she's not working at the station or catching live music, she is writing and performing her own music and contributing her talents to the non-profit group "Songs of Love," which cheers terminally-ill children with songs personalized just for them.

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About: FUV Weekday Music

Claudia's posts on the 'FUV Blog