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Day drinking with Tulsa World’s Jerry Wofford

If you support Tulsa’s music scene, chances are you’ve run into Jerry Wofford at some point. The Tulsa World Scene writer is one of the city’s most loyal boosters of local music and arts, and is frequently found at shows ranging from arena concerts at the BOK Center to local barnburners at Soundpony and Yeti. 

Wofford graduated from OU’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2008. He first covered crime and education at the Manhattan Mercury in Manhattan, Kansas, before moving back to Oklahoma and taking a job at the World in 2010 as a night breaking news/crime reporter. Now, Wofford works at the Scene desk, covering music and writing features. 

The Tulsa Voice: How much latitude do you have regarding a story you’d like to cover?

Jerry Wofford: In the old days, we were more confined. We had beats. But anymore, we all do a little bit of everything.

TTV: How many pieces are you writing per week? 

JW: Everything all together? I’d say about 20.

TTV: I write about six things a year. I’m pretty proud of that. 

JW: It’s a lot. I have to see it in the positive light. The fact that there is much for me to cover means that Tulsa is really kicking ass right now. Our musicians, our venues— we are really lucky to be here in this time period. 

TTV: Do you ever “fanboy” out on people you’re interviewing?

JW: I interviewed Dolly Parton once. As far as, like, fanboying or geeking out—I mean, it’s Dolly. So, yeah.

TTV: Phone interview?

JW: Yeah, so she called, and whenever I answer the phone I say, “Tulsa World, this is Jerry.” And in that unmistakable voice I hear, “Well, hey Jerry from Tulsa World, this is Dolly from Dolly World!” So, at this point, I’m shaking and out of breath. So, yeah, hopefully I didn’t make too much of fool of myself.

TTV: So, you’re a little ways down the road with your new ownership, how have things changed? (editor’s note: in 2013, the Lorton family sold the Tulsa World to Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Media Group)

JW: Well, the goals and the missions have stayed the same. The goal is to tell good stories and to tell the truth. 

TTV: I read on fivethirtyeight.com that only about 20 percent of people still trust their newspapers. Five or six years ago, the death of print journalism seemed a forgone conclusion. Why do you still have a job?

JW: We have a large readership in Tulsa. We have a broad focus and a lot to present to people. We have something for everyone. You know, Fivethirtyeight and CNN are not going to come to Tulsa and cover the Leon Russell tribute at the Cain’s Ballroom or interview the guys that played with him. That’s on us. And if we don’t do that, then we lose something so enormous in this community that it pulls us further apart. 

The normal Tulsan doesn’t have the time to go sit in a city council meeting and figure out what it’s all about. He doesn’t have the ability to sit in on the preliminary hearing for Terence Crutcher. Someone has to be there for the rest of us, to tell us what happened. 

TTV: Do you think Tulsans trust their news sources more than some of the more jaded parts of this country?

JW: I’d like to say that I think so, but I feel like that’s coming from someone that’s inside. I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job explaining to people how this works. There is a very large and burning firewall that exists between us and advertising, between us and the editorial section. 

TTV: Did you go to OU because of journalism or did you find it once you got there?

JW: Actually, I went to OU for meteorology. Growing up around here, I was fascinated by the weather. But it turns out that math is really hard. I was always pretty good at writing, but up to that point I hadn’t really ever tried. OU had this brand new shiny journalism school, so I thought I’d try that. I started working for the OU Daily, doing some reporting and working in the Daily newsroom. That excitement and adrenaline from deadlines—that’s really a thing. That’s real. 

TTV: Do you still feel that way?

JW: Oh, absolutely. It’s a drug for sure. You have to write fast and it has to be complete and it has to be accurate, which are three very big things. The deadline is always five minutes ago. You get really good at it, really fast because you don’t have a choice. And you start to thrive off of that pressure and stress—and that has carried me through until now. When I do big concert reviews, I’ll have to write it and send it in as soon as the show is over to make it to print. So, I’m sitting at the BOK Center writing it on my phone. We print in the middle of the night, so I have to get my stuff in around 10 p.m. or so to the editor. It has to be copy edited and print set and designed—they have to make the plates, you know, it’s a big process.

TTV: It’s kind of crazy that it ever gets done.

JW: Everyday is a miracle at a newspaper. It’s fantastic. Here’s a really good recent example: Leon Russell dies. It’s a Sunday morning. I woke up to text messages from my managing editor. I thought, “Oh, shit.” So I started looking for verifiable sources and yeah, it looks like that happened. 

It’s 8 o’clock in the morning. My brother is staying with me—he’s visiting. He’s watching CBS Sunday Morning on the couch and I’m in my bed writing furiously to at least get something online. Once that was published, we called in a designer, a publisher and an editor and all four of us went in on Sunday morning. Our editor brought breakfast sandwiches from McDonald’s and grapes so we wouldn’t be famished. My little brother came with me and hung out and watched.

So, we start managing this thing. Here’s who I have to get, here’s who I want to get and here’s a list of people it would be nice to get if it works. And we start waking people up on a Sunday morning. It’s stressful, but again that’s part of the appeal of it.

I don’t want this to sound the wrong way, but when you have something happen like that, like Leon’s passing, you have a feeling that this printed information is going to be something that people might want to save. So you want to nail it.

TTV: I gotta be honest, if you guys had dropped the ball on that one, I would’ve been pissed. I mean, if Nashville beats us on this, I’m pissed.

JW: Their’s was trash. [Laughs.] Right. No, we get that. So, that’s a good example of something that happened and we were able to turn it around on a Sunday. Now you have to understand, we already had Monday ready to go and it didn’t have a word about Leon in it. So you just highlight all and “delete.”

TTV: So, how much fun is it to be in a relationship with a “newsman”?

JW: [Laughs] Well, there’s a whole wake of exes that would love to tell you about that. Everyone I’ve ever been with and family and friends, they know what I do. And they know how weird it is. But it doesn’t make it any easier, I suspect. When you have someone in your family or someone you care about that works at the newspaper, you have that life, too.

TTV: Journalistic heroes?

JW: I’d say writing heroes or inspirations. Mary Roach, just a brilliant science writer. Sloan Crosley—I like memoir writers. I like to read people and hear their voice. I like to pick up on meter and cadence and humor. That’s a hard thing to do as a writer. That’s the type of thing I strive to do, to find my voice and make sure that it is clear and unmistakable. 

TTV: Isn’t that hard to do with hard news? Isn’t the idea to take out the personal voice?

JW: Yeah, for sure. I get to do it more in features. That kind of gets back to why I do this in the first place. I want people to see me as the conduit through which they get these stories. I would hope that if people read me that they would get an idea of my personality and my humor in addition to the important information, and that getting those things doesn’t shape their judgment, but that there is some trust built in. 

TTV: Let’s talk about the world of music in 2016. What’s the over/under on Willie Nelson making it out of the year alive?

JW: I swear to God. Lock him in a box with his vitals hooked up—if we lose Willie right now, what kind of world is this? Look, it’s been a really insane year, and obviously I’ve been thinking a lot about it, in that I think we’re getting to a point where in the 60s and 70s there was a saturation of stars. There were just more of them and we knew more about them and so they had larger impacts on our lives. Now they’re getting old. 

TTV: Can you give me a personal favorite album of the last year?

JW: Carter Sampson’s album, Wilder Side. The way that she describes the sense of being alone but that not being necessarily a bad thing—alone but not lonely—that feeling of openness and spirit really connected with me this year. 

Specifically, I took a trip to Arkansas and did a press tour. We stayed at a cabin near the Buffalo River and it was the first cold night of fall up there, everyone else had gone to sleep and there’s no light pollution there—you can see all of the stars. And I’m out there on the balcony with these headphones in and I put on this album and stared out at the stars and listened to it four times in a row. It was just the most serene, life-affirming, recharging thing that I could hope for in this crazy fucking year.

For more from Beau, read his interview with The Bob Dylan Archive curator Michael Chaiken.