Deeper Roots explores the influences, the music, and those who themselves were influenced by the yodeling brakeman. His music was influenced deeply by the blues of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Willie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. And the performers he influenced read more like the comprehensive list of jazz, blues, country, and pop greats….to this day. It is sure to entertain with the music of Rodgers, Bob Dylan, Lefty Frizzell, and Merle Haggard.
Deeper Roots celebrates its first holiday special this weekend spending two hours celebrating a wild yuletide journey filled with blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, and a bit of country. It’s our Blue Light Christmas Special! This year marks the release of a third volume of excavated Christmas recordings by Document Records out of the UK. These are the folks that have brought us the Blues Odyssey series by Bill Wyman and, most recently, they’ve teamed up with Third Man Records for an incredible set of re-mastered Charley Patton and Mississippi Sheiks vinyl releases. We’ll play a number of cuts from their most recent Christmas release, “Blues Blues Christmas” as well as tracks from the first two volumes. The show features performers like Kansas City Kitty, Titus Turner, Bumble Bee Slim, and Smokey Hogg…as well as a blend of country pieces from Merle Haggard, Nick Lowe, and Jimmy Martin. Keep in mind that our Deeper Roots podcasts are always available later in the weekend on deeperroots.podomatic.com for any of you who can’t make the party!
You’ve heard his music and his story is bigger than life. Jerome Felder was raised in Brooklyn to a middle class Jewish family and contracted polio at a very young age. But he also contracted a taste for the blues as an adolescent and did more than make his mark on the American musical fabric of the mid-to-late century. He adopted the stage name of Doc Pomus and, along with Lieber, Stoller, King, and a few others defined the lyric and tone of a generation. Deeper Roots explores the music of Doc Pomus this Friday night at 9 on KWTF. We’ll hear Big Joe Turner’s Piney Brown Blues, a song that inspired him as well as a couple of pieces that he would eventually write for Joe when he was recording in the Atlantic stable. We’ll share the stories and music, including performances by Doc himself, The Coasters, Elvis, Dr. John, and Ray Charles.
This episode has us belly up to the bar, exploring music that’s all about bad habits and those elements that are not very good for health and harmony…and the performers make that very clear. We’ll hear “It Ain’t Far To the Bar”, “Caffeine and Nicotine”, “Wacky Dust”, and a host of other songs that tell the story of misbehavior, anti-sobriety, barrooms, and dens of iniquity. We’ll hear happy, we’ll hear sad, and we’ll hear all those emotions in between…all from performers like Merle Haggard, Victoria Spivey, Johnny Tyler & His Riders of the Rio Grande…and so many others.
Our theme in this week’s episode of Deeper Roots: Black Pearls, a story of the Blues Queens of the Twenties. We’ll hear the music that, throughout the 1920s, could be heard in the tents, theaters, dance halls and cabarets, and on “race” records where Black American women captivated large audiences with their singing of the blues, many paying the toll for their right to be heard, transforming a folk tradition into a popular art.
Based on research from the book of the same name by Daphne Duval Harrison, we’ll hear Trixie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace, and of course, Bessie Smith as they perform music that tell their story: gutsy, yet tender, exploited, but not resentful, independent, yet vulnerable. They introduced a new model of the black woman for the times and their work profoundly affected the American popular music art form.
We’re going to take another Deeper Roots journey exploring the many facets of the vocal group genre; from the jubilee quartets of the early century and jazz stylings that blossomed from the churches and into the mainstream. This episode takes off by highlighting groups like the Harmony Four, The Golden Gate Quartet, and the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet. We then explore a number of the inheritors of the sound in the more consumable refinements of mid-century pop vocal groups like The Mills Brothers, The Selah Singers, and The Ravens. Things will wrap up with a flavor of some of the early street corner doo wop and R&B performers like The Five Royales and The Orioles. Lots to cover, so little time…
We venture a bit deeper…into the well of Pre-Depression music. The Jazz Age had settled in and the broad and diverse sounds of jazz out of the big cities, popular tunes from Broadway, blues from the south, and folk music of the mountains, had begun to reach areas of the country that had no clubs or venues, only a couple of new technologies: radio and Victrola phonographs. These new machines would become household staples and create an industry almost overnight revealing themselves as a mainstream means of cultural dissemination. This was, of course, before some of the lesser-known artists, once sought out by recording studios, would be dropped as the Great Depression would find their funding dry up almost overnight.
We’ll hear the sounds of Al Jolson alongside those of Louis Armstrong, Tampa Red, Mississippi John Hurt, and Barbecue Bob as Dave Stroud hosts a new episode, “Pre-Depression Music”, on Deeper Roots: A Century of America’s music.
“I had heard all the symphonies there were and all the chamber music and the best jazz and I said ‘this is the greatest music’”… Alan Lomax
Deeper Roots presents “Murder Ballads”. Join Dave Stroud for an exploration of the fateful legends of Naomi Wise, Pretty Polly, Hattie Carroll, and Tom Dulah…and others. Many of these ‘true crime’ ballads recall an historic event that grew in myth and legend as its thread was passed and adapted from ear to ear…eventually resolving itself in the story of the perpetrator’s fate.
This episode will be posted to Mixcloud in the near future.
He had become a fixture of the Delta juke joints and small clubs of the South so that when Sam Phillips first recorded him for the Chess Brothers, the change from local legend to urban blues star was a very short journey. He was a giant of a performer in both the figurative sense as well as in real life.
We’ll hear Wolf’s reflections in his own voice as well as the songs that, over the years, were honed into American roots classics. Smokestack Lightnin’, Three Hundred Pounds of Joy, Little Red Rooster, and other pieces of Howlin’ Wolf are a part of this week’s show…performed by both Wolf as well as other artists. Join Dave Stroud for an enlightening journey into the sounds of Howlin Wolf…with its twists of evil, penitence, and fiery passion.
Deeper Roots explores the theme of ‘gambling’ in this episode, first broadcast in March, 2013. Songs of blackjack, cards, dice, gambling and gamblers, including some that have evolved over the centuries, and we’ll hear the inevitable stories of winner’s luck and hard times for the loser. Our performers in this episode include The Burnette Brothers, the Harlem Hamfats, Frankie Laine, and Big Joe Turner…Tune in!
This episode will be posted to Mixcloud in the near future.