Celebrating a recent push into promoting Americana music by KWTF, Sonoma County, Dave Stroud will look back at 2014’s collection of outstanding Americana. The playlist for the evening covers those ‘long in the tooth’ including Willie Nelson and Billy Joe Shaver, a posthumous piece by Johnny Cash, and one of the more energetic throwbacks to 70s outlaw sounds you’ll hear from a songwriter by the name of Sturgill Simpson. There are also the newcomers: Lydia Loveless, Shovels and Rope, and Parker Millsap. Join us in a show that celebrates new music that digs into the roots of the past century of America’s music.
In this episode of Deeper Roots, produced especially for Sonoma County’s newest member-supported community radio station, KWTF, we go Deep In Tradition. The playlist today features just over a dozen songs whose their roots go back beyond the 20th century. Songs in the show include Ida Red, Cotton Eyed Joe, Back Up And Push, River of Jordan, and Arkansas Traveler. Performers include Doc Watson, The Carter Family, Ricky Skaggs, and Jimmie Driftwood. You’ll hear the songs and their stories in this first broadcast of 2015. Please join us for more than just the past century of America’s music from Sonoma County, California.
Lots of early sounds mixed with the new this weekend. Stay tuned for music from the medicine shows, lost provinces, gospel tents, swamps, bandstands, and digital playgrounds. We’ve got Sam Samudio, Shorty Godwin, The Seldom Scene, Shel Silverstein, and Tom Russell in our bi-weekly show broadcast live from the KOWS studios in downtown Occidental, a hamlet tucked into the redwoods along the Bohemian Highway in west Sonoma County. The drought is being beat down and, while we would welcome more rain, we’re hoping that it’s dispersed so that our neighbors can manage without threat of flooding. So we’ll flood you all with a fine collection of performances from the last century of America’s music.
Our show this week will focus on the fire and brimstone of the gospel guitar, including the slide guitar of Blind Willie Johnson, the evangelists like Sister O. M. Terrell, the rhythmic sounds of the Two Gospel Keys, and we’ll also devote a large block of time to the sounds of that splinter genre ‘sacred steel’. While a number of bluesmen like Blind Willie McTell or Gary Davis would use the guitar for an occasional reminder of their faith or to play guest in tent revivals, many of the performers we’ll hear in our show this coming Friday on KWTF will show the best example of the use of guitar as an integral part of the church service itself. Join Dave Stroud for another evening of Deeper Roots.
It’ s a yuletide blues, country, rock, and pop extravaganza. Deeper Roots celebrates the holidays with a selection of holiday hits from the past century. And we don’t necessarily stop there. You’ll also be entertained by some very special blues and R&B numbers selected from the past, featuring selected tracks from an incredible assortment of holiday tracks featured on the Document Records releases “Blues Blues Christmas”, Volumes 1 through 4.
Join Dave Stroud for music from Louis Armstrong, Butterbeans & Susie, Darlene Love, John Prine, and many, many more.
We’ve got a special Monday episode of Deeper Roots. The show originally broadcast live from the KOWS studios in Occidental, California, opens with some Light Crust Doughboys, fires up some modern country gospel from the Watson Twins and Johnny Cash, then goes for the jugular with a collection of Baptist-flavored gospel from Moses Mason, Mother McCollum, and Madam Edna…and that just scratches the sacred surface. The show also features the secular: jump blues from Jesse Price, jazz from Lincoln Center and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Had enough? You won’t. Be sure to check it out.
Our KOWS weekend show airs live every 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month, direct from the KOWS studios in Occidental. In this episode we feature the usual blend of roots music including the country sounds of Joe Maphis, The South Georgia Highballers, Lead Belly, The Levon Helm Band, and we’re going to be entertained by Emmy Oro and her 1950 piece “A Fish House Function (For a Cross Eyed Cat Named Sam)”. And, as usual, it’s so much about the personalities, the stories that the songs tell, as well as the stories behind the music itself. Join Dave Stroud for all of this and more.
In contrast with the folk, blues, and urban sounds being played in the juke joints, ballrooms, and bars in the early century, there was another, much lighter fare being broadcast over the radio airwaves and being celebrated on the silver screen. It was something that was somewhat more benign in its message and certainly more palatable to the masses. It would be called ‘popular music’. But it is as arguably significant as any of the genres we think of as Americana or roots…because it too often shared a common thread of influence.
Deeper Roots marches through the pre-War sounds of Tommy Dorsey and His Clambake Seven, Cliff Edwards, The Boswell Sisters, The Ink Spots, and Eddie Cantor…to name only a few. As the country was still hung over from the Great Depression, the entertainment industry concocted a formula for music and message, painting an overly bright picture of a golden sunrise, reminding folks that “we’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along” even as the dark clouds of tyranny were beginning to spread over Europe. The music represented a sort of blissful ignorance.
Deeper Roots takes the theme route in our next KWTF episode, featuring jazz, gospel, country, blues, rock, and R&B that all share the road with stories of that twentieth century cultural icon (and muse): the automobile. We’ll hear songs of Mercurys, Cadillacs, Fords, and Chevrolets that run the gamut of old and new and tell stories of love in the backseat, first car nostalgia, tragedy on the road, and racing in the streets. Performers in this show includeDavid Lindley, K. C. Douglas, Mink DeVille, Kevin Russell and others who will follow a theme that is one of the more common to come out of our age of assembly lines and the rust belt.
It’s part two of our “Chicago Breakdown” series. In Part I, we explored the early days that promised what was to come but in Part II, we feel the warm wind of change from the south that would meet with the cold winds off of the Great Lakes. It created a vortex where jazz and barrelhouse would reign.
The urban cauldron in this city of big shoulders would fill with a sound that had its roots in the Mississippi Delta , from the cotton plantations and delta heat, and the juke joints that could be found down the side roads off of Highway 61. The Great Migration also provided those who relocated and found work with disposable income allowing them to establish a new life in a big city after the Great Depression and, most certainly, after the war. The resulting energy was inescapable in the clubs and barrooms throughout Chicago.
