COUNTRY BOY MAY BE pushing 90, but he is still at the console every Friday night, bringing listeners on the Eastern Shore his special blend of big band nostalgia.

Eddie Williams has been a fixture at WESR-FM (103.3 on the radio dial) since 1968, when the station owner hired him to do sports and told him he could play whatever he liked over the brand new FM transmitter.

What Williams liked - well, loved is probably more accurate - was the big band sounds of Woody Herman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and especially Glenn Miller.

"To me, that's music," he said.

His show always begins and ends with Miller's "Moonlight Serenade."

Where it goes between is up to Williams and the folks who call in for special requests.

Williams grew up in Eastville. He did his duty in World War II in the Navy. Later he opened a gas station, bought vegetables for a canning company and worked for a fertilizer firm.

He found his way onto the airwaves with a gig as the public address announcer for sports at Central High School.

The radio station owner heard him a few times and asked him to come work there.

The rest is local history.

Williams found a few big band albums at the station. His fans sent in a bunch more. Williams collected his own selections.

Soon he had a vast library of swing and dance music at the station.

The 800 to 1,000 vinyls are gone now, donated to a friend who has a big band show in Maryland.

They weren't of any use to Williams. He had worn out the station's turntables. So he learned to spin CDs instead of queuing up LPs. He has a couple hundred of the CDs, many burned from his original records.

He expects the CDs to be pushed aside by newer technology soon. He'll learn that as well.

It doesn't matter how the music is stored; it's all about the tunes. And Williams pulls them together without a set program, playing "the ones I like plus what the fans like."

His wife died in 1994, and Williams lives alone in Melfa, about six miles down the road from the station.

He's still active, he said, golfing to keep his body fit and doing radio to keep his mind sharp.

When he started, he'd do his big band show on Friday and Saturday nights and then do a Sunday morning gig featuring gospel music.

He still spends weekends at the station, working on Saturdays and Sundays on WESR-AM 1330 doing NASCAR, he said.

"I pull it off the satellite, play the commercials, sell the commercials," he said.

Williams will turn 90 on May 9, but his only concession to time came after a gall bladder operation last year. Now he ends his Friday night show at 10 p.m. instead of midnight.

Nobody's complaining.

"He's the master, the maestro, the old Country Boy," WESR "Swap Shop" and afternoon-drive host Jim Trotter said.

Tony Germanotta, (757) 446-2377, tony.germanotta@pilotonline.com