Harry Harrison, the homey disc jockey who awakened radio listeners and accompanied them on their morning commute with a deep, mellow voice as the “Morning Mayor of New York” for more than four decades, died on Tuesday at his home in Westwood, N.J. He was 89.

The cause was a combination of multiple health problems, his daughter, Patti, said.

Mr. Harrison’s first radio program had played so well in Peoria, Ill., that in 1959, when he was still in his 20s, WMCA brought him to New York. He went on to become the only D.J. to broadcast, in succession, on three of the top music stations in the city. He was a WMCA Good Guy and a WABC All-American — the clubby team names adopted by the stations to brand their announcers — and a morning drive-time host for WCBS, 101.1 FM, until he retired from full-time broadcasting in 2003. (His death certificate said he died at 1:01 p.m.)

While some of his contemporaries harangued or interrupted guests or gratingly volunteered their opinions, Mr. Harrison would wake New Yorkers “as gently as a whiff of fresh-brewed coffee,” the entertainment reporter David Hinckley wrote on medium.com.

What distinguished Mr. Harrison in the highly competitive New York metropolitan market — even before the advent of shock jocks — was his folksy Midwest patter.