The show kicks off with some mid-century country fiddlin’ courtesy of Curly Fox but makes a quick left turn with a set about liars, tattlers, and some straight-forward testifying from Sister Rosetta Tharpe. We’ll also be entertained with some classic roots from the Dallas String Band, Lead Belly, E. C. Ball, and a tribute set to Sam Cooke.
Generations of youth over the last century grew up with the images of cowpokes, rustlers, bad guys, and ranching through dime novels, radio, television and, of course, the music. In this episode of Deeper Roots, we focus on the legacy of the ‘cowboy crooners’ and country balladeers who sang about life on the trail alongside the grub wagon on the lone prairie where the imagination could take you anywhere it pleased…and often did. We’ll hear the earliest ‘cowboy songs’ by Vernon Dalhart and Carl Sprague; and we’ll also find ourselves being serenaded (quite gently) by Tex Ritter and Gene Autry who reached out for the generic, mass appeal. The music was full of tradition as well and we’ll hear some contemporary reflections from David Wilkie And Cowboy Celtic, Jim Lauderdale, and (of course) Waylon, Willie, Merle, and Johnny.
We’ve got ‘songs of the sauce’, so to speak. Our show will feature a century of America’s music with stories of moonshine, rye whiskey, bubbles in the beer, bartenders, and hangovers going as far back as 1928. But we’ve also got a Bob Wills tribute piece from a new Asleep at the Wheel release, indie rockabilly from new Austinians Tammy Lynn & Myles High, R&B truckers The Harlem Hamfats, and local favorite David Luning. Join Dave Stroud for another two hours of a century of America’s Music on KWTF, member-supported community radio for Bodega Bay and all of Sonoma County.
“A Dime Looks Like a Wagon Wheel”….a phrase that was used to indicate how fortunate you felt when just a little seemed so big when you had so little to start with. Old timey music, some sweet R&B from Sam Cooke, country styles from Johnny Cash and Hank Thompson, folk and blues from Dave Van Ronk, Woody Guthrie, and Peter Rowan….and newer sounds from The Far West, Steep Canyon Rangers, and Howell Devine. Two hours of Deeper Roots looks like that same wagon wheel…it goes by fast and we’ll have the very best of American roots music from the past century Saturday morning at 9am on KOWS.
| No. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Artist | Title | Album | Buy |
| 2 | Hardrock Gunter | Boogie Woogie On A Saturday Night | Boogie Man Boogie |  |
| 3 | Rosanne Cash | Big River | Right or Wrong | |
| 4 | Johnny Cash | Big River | Get Rhythm [Sun] | |
| 5 | Bill Monroe | Big River | Bluegrass 1959-1969 [Disc 1] | |
| 6 | The Nashville Bluegrass Band | The Johnson Boys | American Beauty | |
| 7 | Don Reno/Red Smiley | A Dime Looks Loke a Wagon Wheel | Together Again | |
| 8 | Steep Canyon Rangers | Good Old Country Baptizing | Mr. Taylor's New Home | |
| 9 | Bobby Hicks & Del McCoury | We're Steppin' Out Tonight | Bluegrass Number 1's: A Collection of Chart-Topping Songs | |
| 10 | Willie Nelson | Texas on a Saturday Night | Revolutions of Time: The Journey 1975-1993 Disc 2 | |
| 11 | Red Foley | Tennessee Saturday Night | Hillbilly Fever [Disc 2] | |
| 12 | Ella Mae Morse | Tennessee Saturday Night | The Morse Code [Disc 2] | |
| 13 | Frank Sinatra | Saturday Night (Is The Loneliest Night In The Week) | Swing And Dance With Frank Sinatra | |
| 14 | Sam Cooke | Another Saturday Night | Portrait Of A Legend 1951-1964 | |
| 15 | Junior Brown | Long Walk Back to San Antone | Long Walk Back | |
| 16 | The Green River Boys feat. Glen Campbell | Poor Boy Looking for a Home | James Burton – The Early Years 1957-1969 | |
| 17 | Hank Thompson & His Brazos Valley Boys | New Green Light, The | Vintage Collections | |
| 18 | Roy Rogers | I Can't Go on This Way | 1942-1947 (Warped 4561) | |
| 19 | The Far West | Maricopa City Lights | The Far West | |
| 20 | Bo Diddley | I'm Looking For A Woman | His Best: The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection | |
| 21 | Markus James | Diddley Bow and Buckets | Head For The Hills | |
| 22 | Howell Devine | Devil Got My Woman | Delta Grooves | |
| 23 | Skip James | Devil Got My Woman | Ghost World | |
| 24 | Rory Block | Devil Got My Man | Gone Woman Blues: The Country Blues Collection | |
| 25 | Bonnie Raitt | Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead | Bonnie Raitt | |
| 26 | Peter Rowan | Dust Bowl Children | Dust Bowl Children | |
| 27 | Woody Guthrie | Blowing Down That Old Dusty Road (Going Down the Road Feelin' Bad) | Dust Bowl Ballads [Rounder] | |
| 28 | Ramblin' Jack Elliott | Hard Travellin' | Dust Bowl Blues Essential American Folk | |
| 29 | The Reverend Gary Davis | You Got to Move | At Newport | |
| 30 | Markus James | Goin' Down South | Head For The Hills | |
| 31 | Louis Jordan | No Sale | Jivin' With Jordan | |
| 32 | Benny Goodman | He Ain't Got Rhythm | Sing, Sing, Sing | |
| 33 | Johnny Hamp Orchestra | Ooh! Hoo! Yoo-Hoo! | Johnny Hamp at Archive | |
We’ve got a show jam-packed with gospel sounds set against a backdrop of fiery fields, unclouded days, and great speckled birds. Join us on our regular two hour Friday night show on KWTF as we take a trip down the country gospel highway, celebrating a style of music that was mostly inspired by the memories of ‘back home’ and the church, where a lot of our performers were first introduced to music. We’ll share that old time religion in spiritual and song from deep in the heartland. We open with some of the classic old time gospel sounds of The Carter Family and J. E. Mainer’s Mountaineer then go flying down heaven’s railway on the Gospel Cannonball while Johnny Cash, The Louvin Brothers, T. Texas Tyler, Hank Williams, and Kitty Wells will be preaching on that old country gospel stage alongside bluegrass gospel favorites from mid-century.And we’ll also hear a couple of new tracks from Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives.
Second Saturday on KOWS…that means a vintage blend of Deeper Roots. Our show opens with some contemporary bluegrass and gets right down to business with some country gospel and blues with an opening admonition from Sister Aimee Semple McPherson punctuated with songs of drinking and old time religion. From there we move on to the jazz sounds of Fats Waller and a run of mid-to-late century country featuring Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, and the sass of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. It’s another beautiful spring morning in the small West Sonoma County hamlet of Occidental…nestled in the woods along the Bohemian Highway and celebrated from the studios of KOWS Community Radio.
From the French Quarter back to Congo Square…this episode celebrates a mix of sounds all thrown into a stew that’s been simmering and feeding the soul of the gulf for hundreds of years. Acadian songs, the word Acadian is derived from the French Canadian, were long ballads originating in France and they generally spoke of hard living. Mix that with the Native American and Scots-Irish jigs and reels, and lay it all out in Lousiana where even more influence could be absorbed from the Carribean/Cuban/Haitian populace and there you have it. We’ll share the early century ‘ancestral’ sounds of Blind Uncle Gaspard and Leo Soileau as well as the music of Queen Ida and Beau Jocque. It promises to be uplifting, wild, and your foot will be tapping…
It’s theme time once again on Deeper Roots. We’ve got songs that explore the topic of jails, prisons, work farms, and the incarcerated. There we find the overnighters, the vagabonds, the jealous lovers, the desperate thieves, and the stories of ladies and gentlemen on both sides of the bars. There will be old-timey cowboy classics from Vernon Dalhart and Carl T. Sprague, modern covers by David Johansen and The Byrds, blues from Lightnin’ Hopkins and Blind Boy Fuller, and a whole lot more. Join us for the stories of the songs and performers this week on Deeper Roots.
It’s our regular (well, even Saturday mornings) show featuring an early country and bluegrass set featuring new sounds from Steve Earle and Robert Earl Keen, Jr. alongside the classic sounds of Buck Owens, Leon Chappell and The Louvins. We’ve got gospel and blues as well as a rare set of sounds from the second omnibus of “The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records”, classic late twenties country and blues. Stay tuned for your morning dose of brew d’Roots and American Roots Breakfast Tea on a spring Saturday morning in West Sonoma County.
While Bob Dylan’s greatest early influence was likely Woody Guthrie he spent his career exhibiting both love and thievery of the Americana music canon. Love, in the sense that he would pay tribute and admire the story-telling, and theft, in that he would copy old lines for his own purposes or reassemble them into a larger story. His not-so-obvious album release titled “Love and Theft” hints at his own sardonic wit in the matter.
Pablo Picasso has been quoted thusly: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” It’s a concept that goes back much further. The works of T.S. Eliot discuss the concept of how artistic theft leads to the creation of new ideas in art and many of the early playwrights, Shakespeare included, would steal in part or in whole. The argument that Dylan’s intentions are somewhat more nefarious in the era of copyrights and royalties is likely misguided because it assumes that no artist would have previously been paid for their ‘pilfered’ works.
In this episode of Deeper Roots, first broadcast on KWTF Sonoma County March 20, 2015, we’ll spend two hours mining through some of those influences with music from Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, Doc Watson, Frank Crumit, Mississippi John Hurt, and the bard himself in an episode titled “Bob Dylan and Tradition”. In keeping with our theme, parts of today’s show are loosely based, or maybe paraphrased, from a wonderful study of Dylan’s career in the context of American tradition including minstrelsy, gospel, folk, country, pop, and blues…all of those things that Dylan has imparted in sometimes not-so-subtle ways in his music. The book, Bob Dylan in America: the book by Sean Wilentz, contributing editor to the New Republic and Professor of History at Princeton. The book was published by Doubleday in 2010.