Free form with just a dose of playlist themes…R&B and sugar from Chuck Willis, some sweeter country from Bob Wills, more of the same with a moonlight-based theme from Tommy Duncan, Dale Evans, and Elton Britt. We’ve also got a mix of early century jazz from Satchmo and blues from Tampa Red, Charley Patton, and Blind Blake. Tune into community radio locally on KWTF 88.1 on the FM dial or catch us streaming on TuneIn, RadioBox, or from our web site at kwtf.net/listen.
Category Archives: Featured Music
No Parking Here – KOWS October 10, 2015
Saturday mornings are root-bound…in the very best sense of the phrase. Tune into KOWS for an eclectic blend of gospel from Jimmy Murphy and The Loyal Five, early century pop from Cliff Edwards and Emmett Miler, R&B from Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Dr. John, country from Red Foley and Jimmy Littlejohn, and more of the sounds that matters from the past century of American music.
Wild Men and Wild Women
It’s theme time once again and we’re going to find ourselves among the wild and crazy men as well as the wild, woolly women. Round town girls celebrate, burning that candle, and Keely Smith will jump, jive, and wail with Louis Prima. Red Ingle and His Natural Seven will join the Sons of the Pioneers in spreading the word about ‘cigareets, whuskey, and wild, wild women”. Mae West, Julia Lee, Ernie Ford, and Jerry Lee Lewis will keep the party going and Deeper Roots will keep the lights on ’till 11pm sharp (that’s Pacific Time, of course). Join Dave Stroud for another two hours of a century of America’s music on KWTF, 88.1 FM, community radio for Bodega Bay.
Pickin’ Time – KOWS Oct 5, 2015
Dave Stroud will be sitting in tonight for Mark Hogan once again at 6pm Pacific. He’s got another episode of Deeper Roots Radio: A Century of America’s Music. In this episode, he’ll be following along Mark’s theme of old time and bluegrass, old and new. The playlist this evening will include bluegrass from James King, Mac Wiseman, David Grisman and Bill Monroe. He’ll also be sharing new tracks from Susie Blue and the Lonesome Fellas, Kinky Friedman, The Dustbowl Revival (fresh from Hardly Strictly Bluegrass this past weekend), and a couple of tracks fromLowell Levinger From The Youngbloods’s new album “Get Together – Youngblood Classics”. Tune in for some Eddy Arnold tribute pieces, music about the married life, and a couple of fine recordings of the great guitar pioneer Riley Puckett.
Deeper Hoagy Carmichael
Our show explores the music of the great Hoagy Carmichael, the American songwriter who would pair up with some of the great lyricists of the early century to produce a body of work that, while it generally is written about another time in the south, endures for it’s soft-spoken charm, inventiveness, and sophistication. He worked his way through law school by performing in his own three-piece band but a couple of his early songs, “Riverboat Shuffle” and “Stardust” made it clear that songwriting was the inevitable vocation for this would-be lawyer. Although the Great Depression almost put him back with the bar, it was the song “Stardust” that would convince him that he could make a go of it. And he did. He was a font of music, teaming with Johnny Mercer and numerous other great lyricists to pen songs that maintain a fresh face to this day…and Deeper Roots will have the vintage sounds of Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, and The Mills Brothers alongside the contemporary interpretations of Carmichael’s standards including Linda Ronstadt, Norah Jones, and Junior Brown. Join Dave Stroud as he queues up the timeless work of Hoagy Carmichael.
High Noon
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.
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.