It’s a new morning…as it always is…and was when we celebrated another Saturday morning in Occidental with Deeper Roots Radio: A Century of America’s Music with host Dave Stroud. This twice-monthly show opens with a mule kicking in the stall, some barnyard rhythm and then moves swiftly into a blend of 1950s country and big band. Ray Charles, Frankie Laine, Chick Webb, Otis Spann, and Merle Travis are just a sampling of performers we’ll hear from. West County living deserves roots music wafting over the airwaves on a Saturday morning in early autumn. Let’s set the airwaves stage with some Otis Spann.
All posts by Dave
The Dust-to-Digital Label
Our weekly KWTF show is about a label whose chief purpose is the resurrection of that curious mix of ephemera, folklore, ancestry, and musicianship that reveals itself as folk music: whether it be pre-Monroe bluegrass, gospel, blues, or early pop. The label I speak of is Dust-To-Digital and we’ll scratch the surface of some of the great work that they’ve issued since 1999, the year Lance Ledbetter and his wife April open shop in Atlanta, Georgia.Their mission is the same as it was then: to produce high quality cultural artifacts.
Pitchfork magazine put it this way: “Although the folklorists lugging around tape recorders (and the performers carrying on ancient traditions) are worthy of much heralding, it’s equally astounding how essential Lance Ledbetter’s work at Dust-to-Digital has been to the preservation of traditional American folksong. It’s easy to buy and appreciate these sets without realizing that the bulk of the material might have been lost — or, at the very least, tethered to archives, readily accessible only to curious faculty, paper-writing students, and bespectacled researchers — without Ledbetter’s interference.”
Modern Americana in Tradition
We revisit tradition and roots with a number of contemporary performers who honor the American musical heritage with new arrangements, new interpretations, and songs whose lyrics might take on a different meaning in a new time. What was ripe for picking in the first part of the century might not mean all of the same in our world today. We’ll hear songs of love, death, destitution, prostitution, farmer’s work, the sky above and the sea below… You’ll hear Americana releases from as far back as 1971 and we’ll include a number of tracks from this year…the year 2015…with the one thing in common being that the songs performed have stories that go further back and, in most cases, go so far back that they are considered traditional.
Hillbilly Fever
The sound was simple, fun, and certainly influential. It evolved from ancestral celebrations…finding its groove by the mid 1930s and playing itself out as a popular voice well through the early days of what was termed the Golden Age of Country Music, the 1950s. The entertainment industry collectively shunned the hillbilly term by the mid-50s, choosing the more sedate “Country and Western” moniker and certainly the even more narcoleptic sound of Nashvile going into the coming decade and beyond. Hillbilly music lives today only as splinter and special edge-case Americana. Listen and find out.
Roots of R&B
“Rhythm n’ Blues” and “Rock n’ Roll” were both born of a raw sound that was an amalgam of lyrical call-and-response, the upbeat bounce of barrelhouse and juke joint piano, traditional rhyme, and an abundance of musical brilliance from the many itinerant performers who plied their trade. This week on Deeper Roots we’ll go find the “Roots of R&B” and find a stage that we often visit, spending time with the performers that we seem to always find in its lights. Big Bill Broonzy, Roosevelt Sykes, Leroy Carr, Memphis Minnie, and Lonnie Johnson are just a sampling of the music we’ll bring you on our show produced especially for KWTF 88.1 FM, listener-supported community radio for Sonoma County.
Songs About Doctors
We go to the theme well once more on Deeper Roots, this time with music that explores the tincture of hadacol, the sick bed blues, the boogie woogie flu, measles, whooping cough, and snake oil…all in a show full of the very best of music about being sick in bed and sending for the doctor from the last century of big band, jazz, country, blues, and rock.
Dark Moon
We’re going to go pretty deep this coming Saturday morning here in Western Sonoma County. It’s a mix of old time and tradition with a few themed sets including social sciences, the labor blues, calypso rhythm, minstrelsy, and some special sounds from Ira and Charlie Louvin. Performers this week include Darby & Tarlton, Riley Puckett, Fern Jones, Arizona Dranes, and a pair each from Ry Cooder and Harry Belafonte. It’s a “Great Dream From Heaven” for KOWS listeners on an August morning in Occidental. Broadcast on KOWS 107.3 FM on August 22, 2015.
Back to Bakersfield
Deeper Roots heads down the long hot stretch of 99 to California’s Central Valley to visit the country sound that blew in from every direction…starting with the Dust Bowl. Bakersfield was a first step, a way station, for migrant workers coming into California to escape hard times in the Midwest; their treatment by the small minds of fearful communities being little different than those migrants we think of today. “In the years following World War II, Bakersfield had plentiful honky-tonks including the soon-to-be-famous Blackboard Cafe. People drank, danced, and even fought to Western swing music.” The sound of Nashville began to become watered down, losing its appeal to some who thought it had lost a reverence for the heart and soul of working class Country. We’ll hear from Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Wynn Stewart, Tommy Collins, and Billy Mize and tip our cap to a great book on the subject of the Bakersfield sound and the history of Country Music: Workin’ Man Blues written by local author and Central Valley native, Gerald Haslam.
Songs of the Century – Misses
Join us on our second of two episodes exploring the Top 30 songs of the 20th century as it is so suggested by the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA)…this time, however, Dave Stroud suggests 30 that he believes were worthy of the list but which either a) did not make the list or was b) buried further down the larger list of 365. The fun continues. Last week we discovered that “Over the Rainbow” was #1 and that “Rhapsody in Blue” was nowhere to be found on the larger list. This week we get payback and find songs like “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, “Rocket 88″, and “West End Blues” our own list. Our list too is not without controversy.
San Antone – KOWS August 10, 2015
We’re filling in once more for Mark Hogan and his Bluegrass and Old Time Hour. This week, we’ve put together another two hours of music that spans close to a full century…including Cliff Edwards from 1933, Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Lunceford, and Dave Van Ronk (just to name a few). There will be some themes and schemes built into our sets this evening including the story of Caldonia, the Texas town of San Antone, and heading down a dusty road of a century of America’s music.