Sean McMaster & Richie Phillips
For more than 16 years, Sean McMaster and Richie Phillips dominated the morning drive in Albany by hosting the “Sean and Richie Show” on WGNA (107.7 FM). Together, this dynamic team brightened the mornings of listeners throughout the Capital Region.
Sean McMaster – Sean currently co-hosts the top-rated morning drive show, “Sean and Andrea” with his wife Andrea on Pamal Broadcasting’s “The CAT” (100.9/107.1 FM). He is a veteran broadcaster of over 30 years and has been a morning drive on-air personality for 25 years.
In his career, he has won multiple awards, including CMA Personality of the Year, multiple New York State Broadcaster’s awards, and many awards and citations for his work with charities.
With a focus on children, over his career Sean has raised millions of dollars for charities like St. Jude, Make A Wish, the Special Olympics, and The Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Capital Region. Sean also had a hand in creating his own Charites including Pennies from Heaven and Blue Friday.
Sean, a lifelong native of the Capital District, lives in Clifton Park with his morning show partner and wife Andrea, and three amazing boys Ryan, Andy, and Caden. He also has a cat named Pluto and his best friend, a black lab named Sam. On a personal note, Sean loves music, movies, travel, football, golf, anything science fiction, and hanging out at home relaxing.
Richie Phillips – In 1980, Eastern Long Island native and former tenured high school history teacher Richie Phillips decided to trade in the security of a blackboard for a keyboard and move to the Albany area to entertain in clubs and piano bars. As luck would have it, he landed a gig in the prestigious 21 Club in downtown Albany, a popular haunt for politicians and influential business leaders—a position he held there nightly for over seven years between 1981 and 1988.
Boring quickly of playing background music, however, he decided to try his hand at lampooning the issues of the day in song – patterning himself after national satirist, Mark Russell. That caught the ear of a local radio station program director, the late “Uncle Fred” Horton, and landed him a morning radio spot with Horton on WTRY AM in Albany. They became the morning breakfast flakes with “Uncle Fred and Rhymin’ Richie.” Together, they enjoyed top ratings, only to quickly receive a new opportunity: a move to country station WGNA in August of 1988, after only 6 months on the air. Knowing very little about country music, Richie took the job basically as a lark – a temporary move. Temporary? Hardly! He stayed for 29 very successful years, the last 16 with Sean McMaster as part of the “Sean and Richie Show.”
Richie won a national CMA award in their first year together in 2000 and has garnered multiple awards over the years for his community involvement, including two New York State Broadcasters Association honors for his school songwriting program – Reading, Writing and Rhyming. To add this latest “NYSBA Hall of Fame” acknowledgment to his mantle is an amazing addition and a highly cherished one. He is eternally grateful to the NYSBA for this honor. Richie retired in 2016 and has been married for 38 years to his wife Dorrie. Richie has a wonderful son Ben, who is married to his equally wonderful wife Colleen, with two amazing grandchildren, Arron and Tess.