The 60-minute show is recorded in a 9-by-9-foot room at his home on Ditton Street, with Cutler hunkered in a nook between two CD players, a mixing board, two turntables and thousands of CDs and records.

His hands work the buttons and knobs while his eyes drift emptily. He flips a switch, the sounds of a blazing banjo fill the air and a prerecorded voice says: "Hello, I'm Bruce Cutler, and you're in time for another edition of 'Gospel Doings.'"

Cutler pushes a button, puts his lips to the microphone and says a prayer for the homeless and the incarcerated. He hits a switch on the CD player, and a tune about bad and good days - half barbershop, half gospel - plays.

Cutler has hosted "Gospel Doings" for 10 years. The show airs at 2 p.m. Sundays on WLNL-AM 1000 in Horseheads. Although unpaid, it's a successful, steady gig in a lifetime of on-again-off-again volunteer radio. With it, he's won three national awards and interviewed the heavyweights of country, gospel and bluegrass.

"I've been very lucky," he says. "This show has taken me places I'd never dreamed of."

Cutler was born in 1949 in Waverly, with cataracts that left him seeing only "shadows and blurs of colors." He spent most of his youth surrounded by fences and concrete walls at a school for the blind in Philadelphia.

"Other kids were on the street playing," he says. "I was listening to the radio.

"It was the only way I could get out."

As an adult, Cutler took a job in Rochester as a janitor. He began moonlighting at radio stations in the 1970s, but only as a volunteer. No one would hire him.

"One manager saw me squinting at a piece of paper," he said. "He grabbed my neck, rammed my face into the paper, and said, 'Maybe if you can't see it, you can smell it.'"

In 1986, Cutler retired and went on disability. Corneal transplants in the 1970s had left his eyes so sensitive that bending or lifting could ruin the retinas, even though they improved his sight so much that he could drive for the first time.

For the next 14 years, he recorded shows for 13 radio stations in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and drove his Ford pickup, always on his own dime, to a different festival nearly every week, from the Southern Tier to Nashville, where, portable cassette player in hand, he met and interviewed musicians he'd admired his whole life.

He caught Ricky Van Shelton outside the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in 1999. He tracked down Bill Monroe in West Virginia in 1994. He cornered his hero, mandolin player Doyle Lawson, at a festival in Addison in 1993.

In 2000, glaucoma again ruined Cutler's eyes, forcing him to abandon his pickup. Yet his show continues. Unable to travel alone, he relies on canned phone interviews and depends on friends for rides to a handful of events he attends each year.

Cutler plays a clip from an event he attended last month, the Country Gospel Music Awards in Hot Springs, Ark. He and a woman are announcing this year's best new male and female artists. She forgot her papers; Cutler struggled to read the names on his.

"The blind leading the blind," the woman said. Cutler laughed.

Back in the studio, it's time for a scripture reading by his wife, Connie. Her eyesight was destroyed by the oxygen in the incubator where she spent the first weeks of her life.

At a desk behind Bruce, she leans over a tattered book with a maroon cover. It appears to be a photo album but is actually a Braille Bible.

"In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God ... ," she says.

Later she notes that today's reading was live. Usually she records them.

"Everything is live on this show," Bruce corrects her, in a deep, slurred voice, once rejected by a radio manager as "too hillbilly."

"I've never seen a dead person read the scriptures yet."

A clip from this year's Christian Country Music Awards in Nashville spins in the CD player; on it, Cutler won an award for "going above and beyond the call of duty" in broadcasting. In 2000 and 2001, he won the Country Gospel Music Guild Radio Show of the Year Award.

With a fiddle and slide guitar humming in the background, Cutler presses his face to a hand-held timer. He marks his clipboard. He just passed 29 minutes.

"Running long," he says. "I'm going to have to skip 'Tidbits of Interest' today."

That's the segment where Cutler announces the names of famous people who died or were born that week. He does this with a machine that picks fine type off a calendar and projects letters the size of refrigerator magnets onto a built-in screen.

"I always pre-record that part," he says "I don't want to sound like a bumbling, blind fool fiddling with the projector."

Cutler plays a tape of an interview with Floyd and Fran Sears, country musicians from Ovid, recorded in Lyons.

He asks them, "Is Fran just the chief cook and bottle washer or does she do more?"

Floyd laughs. Fran quotes the Bible. Cutler says "Amen."

A framed TV-tray sized portrait of Jesus looks down on the Cutlers. Bruce credits God with saving him from an obsession with music that in the 1970s threatened to destroy him.

"I was worse than a drug addict at a dope convention," he said. "If I heard a song on the radio I had to buy the album, whether I liked the song or not.

"We didn't have money for long distance calls to family, and I was buying 20 records a week," he said. "Then I went to church, lost my obsessive hunger for music and today I have a radio show that's taken me across the country."

The show ends with a Sears Family number about a doctor who makes house calls.

Cutler stuffs four cassettes into a brown box, brings the box within a penny-length of his eyes, and scrawls an address on it. He will leave it in the mailbox for the mail carrier to take to Horseheads. The show recorded today will be aired on the last Sunday in December.

On off days, Cutler compiles set lists, listens to CDs, answers mail and contacts record companies for interviews. He tapes four "Gospel Doings" in a marathon session one day each month.

"I turn off the phone, sit down in front of the mike with my clipboard, and I don't know about anything," he says. "If the world ends in those four hours, it's not my problem. I only answer to the Lord."