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KAAY is a 50,000 watt, class 1C AM radio station in Little Rock, Arkansas licensed on 1090 kHz. The signal of this clear channel station reaches from Canada to Central and South America.

The Jingle in the late 60's started with thunder then in a roaring deep voice....FIFTY THOUSAND WATTS OF MUSIC POWER K-DOUBLE A-Y LITTLE ROCK.

KAAY was founded as KTHS in 1924 in Hot Springs; it moved to Little Rock in 1953. After the TV station KTHV was created from it in 1955, KTHS was sold to LIN Broadcasting, who turned it into a Top 40 station in 1962 under its present callsign. It has been a stalwart of Christian radio since 1985, and has been owned by Citadel Broadcasting since 1998.

KAAY's cult status was forged in the late 1960s, when, after 11:00 each evening, the station abandoned the standard Top 40 format for three hours of underground music with the program Beaker Street hosted by Clyde Clifford (actually Dale Seidenschwarz),. [1]

During the station's heyday, KAAY featured a full service Top-40 format, and was the dominant station for most of the state of Arkansas. During the 1960's and 1970's, some of the favorite personalities included Sonny Martin, newsman George Jennings, Wayne Moss, Phil North, and Ray Lincoln of the "Ray and Ram Show". Its nighttime signal extended well beyond Little Rock and Arkansas, covering much of the Great Plains, North Central, and Mid South regions of the United States, thereby living up to its identifier as "The Mighty Ten Ninety.". In fact, KAAY could be heard clearly at night in Key West, Florida, and quite well in Duluth, Minnesota!

The station abandoned the music format, and underwent several changes in ownership during the mid-1980's. Religious broadcasters have utilized KAAY's monster signal to spread messages nationwide. It was mainly a Southern gospel station when it entered Christian radio in 1985, but it switched to contemporary Christian music in 2000.

On Labor Day Weekend 2003, the station returned to its roots with a historical segment called "KAAY Rewound". KAAY's Barry Mac and sister station KARN's Grant Merrill played the hits and took calls from all over the country. Clyde Clifford returned to talk about "Beaker Street". This eventually led to a weekly segment called "Radio Yesterday" which features the memories of the station's heyday.

• Official web site
• KAAY station history
• KTHV station history (including KTHS)
• Whatever Happened to the Mighty 1090 KAAY?
• KAAY: The Mighty 1090 Gave Arkansas to North America
• Radio Yesterday program page