Over the past six months, three people foundational to WRIR 97.3 FM, Richmond’s volunteer-run station built outside the expectations of corporate radio, rooted in a love of music, giving locals a voice, and creating space where there wasn’t any, have died.
All from cancer.
It’s hard to put into words, but for those of us who’ve been here a while, in a city where the same names have long been part of its cultural fabric, you start to expect they’ll always be here.
William “Bill” Lupoletti was a co-founder of WRIR and the longtime host of Global A Go-Go, he was part of that early group that believed a volunteer-run station, playing what it wanted and saying what it needed to say, could actually work here.
Since the station launched in 2005, he hosted Global A Go-Go, a weekly two-hour world music show that grew beyond Richmond, eventually reaching international audiences and being rebroadcast on multiple stations across the U.S. and Canada. WRIR described him as “a pillar of Richmond’s world music community,” someone who encouraged listeners to explore beyond borders and find connection through music.
His show reflected that. It moved across borders, pulling in sounds that didn’t always have a place on traditional radio. It made Richmond feel a little bigger by connecting us to the world every week. He liked to say that “world music is local music from somewhere else,” and his mission was clear: “decolonizing your ears since 2005.”
If you listened regularly, you knew the rhythm of it. The greeting, “Dobro došli!” The reminder that “the future is unwritten.” It wasn’t just a show, it was a point of view.
Even toward the end, he was still doing the work, connecting people and helping things happen without much attention. In the months before he passed, he continued introducing organizers and pushing ideas forward.
He passed November 2025 and was 66 years old.
Melissa Vaughn came later, into a different phase of the same project.
As executive director of WRIR, she wasn’t building from scratch. She was trying to keep something alive, dealing with funding gaps, infrastructure issues, and the constant turnover that comes with a volunteer base, the kind of work that only gets noticed when it stops happening.
She was also one of the founders of RVA Dirt, a group that delivered live updates from Richmond City Council and school board meetings and forums on social media, and regularly contributed to the station’s public affairs show, Open Source RVA.
Beyond her formal role, she was deeply embedded in the station itself, hosting and contributing to shows, training volunteers, and shaping the sound and direction of WRIR in ways that extended well beyond any single title. She was a constant presence, someone who was always in the room, pushing conversations forward and making space for others to step in.
She died in January at 46.
We spoke with her not long before that, and she talked about WRIR in practical terms, what it needed, what it lacked, what it could lose if people stopped paying attention, its place in Richmond’s media ecosystem, and how much she loved the city.
A celebration of Melissa Vaughn will be held on March 28, 2026, at 12:30 PM at Gallery5.
Christopher Maxwell was there at the beginning, too, another co-founder and one of the people who pushed WRIR into existence when it was still just an idea competing with a radio system and laws that weren’t built to make room for it.
By the time we spoke with him in 2024, he already knew how this was going to end. He didn’t argue with that, he just kept it moving, talking about WRIR as the thing he was most proud of, about fighting off efforts that could have wiped out independent stations entirely, and about the importance of showing up, figuring things out, and doing the work anyway.
At one point, describing what was left, he put it in terms that were hard to misread. He was a “sinking battleship,” still under power, still steering, trying to do as much damage as possible on the way out. That was Chris Maxwell until the end. That was how he saw himself, and it’s hard to argue with it.
He died this week after a long battle with cancer. He was 60 years old.
He hadn’t been active at WRIR in recent years, but that’s not really how these things work, once you build something like that, your name doesn’t come off it, it becomes part of the foundation.
A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on April 4 at the Richmond Friends Meeting House, 4500 Kensington Ave. A Celebration of Life at the Byrd Theatre will be announced at a later date.
And WRIR is still there, still broadcasting and doing what it has always done, a little bit of everything held together by people who care enough to keep showing up, but the texture of it has changed. The hope is that a new generation steps up to lead the station into its next phase, including the new downtown space.
But it does feel like something has shifted. A generation of grassroots organizers, artists, and community builders I grew up with in this city is starting to pass on.
Add in the recent losses of William “Bill” Martin, executive director of the Valentine, the closing of The Richmond Free Press, Richmond icon D’Angelo and longtime activist Farid Alan Schintzius, who would often tell me, “We need a little good trouble, don’t we?” and the cultural landscape around Richmond is changing.
Taken together, these losses leave a gap, but also a responsibility. Where we go from here, as it always has been, depends on the rest of us continuing to honor their legacies and doing the work to make our city, our community, better, one idea and one action at a time.
If you would like to make a donation to WRIR 97.3 FM, you can do that HERE.
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