From those blue shadows on the trail that were only imagined in black and white to the notion of good guys with tall white hats chasing down the bad guys across the expanse of the Alabama Hills where Hollywood carved out a little piece of the West…we’re going to go riding down some musical canyons with some of the great musical cowboys of the silver screen. Fewer of us are around that once followed the serial antics of Gene and Smiley or Roy and Dale on Saturday morning reruns of flickering cowboy ‘mysteries’ where music played a big part of the story. After all, a clean shaven singing cowboy with a scarf, white hat and a twinkle in his eye was much more appealing than what the reality was…I think that’s a safe assumption. Tune in for music from Gene Autry, The Sons of the Pioneers, Rex Allen, Tex Ritter and over a dozen others as Dave Stroud spins the shellacs from the 30s, 40s and 50s…and we might even track down later covers that tip the cap here on KOWS Community Radio.
Category Archives: Oldies
Mix Master’s Delight
An eclectic free form blend of sounds featuring a variety highlighted by Memphis Minnie, T-Bone Burnett, The Rascals, The Miracles and Carole King…plus over a dozen others in our last show of summer 2023. As the walls of justice close in on traitors and seditionists, we lean on the hope that the constitutional provision that prevents their ilk from ever holding office is the key to saving democracy. Politics aside, the music this week features songs about baking biscuits, diamonds, shopping around, head spinning and what it’s like living here in the U.S.A. Friday morning’s Deeper Roots is a blend of classic and deep tracks designed to set the table for the weekend, right here on Community Radio for West Sonoma County and the world. Tune in, turn on but don’t, just don’t, drop out.
Labor Day 2023
We’ve got a Labor Day collection of songs…songs celebrating working men and women and these are songs of both honor and protest, taking us back to the Great Depression when work was hard to find. We’ll also be celebrating the core fight for organizing…whether you’re fighting for the day-to-day pressure of producing faster and better in front of a computer or you’re steaming lattes for the hurried throngs, you have a right to organize and much of the music we’ll share today reinforces the concept. While unions are demonized with threats of offshoring…you know it will be done either way. Music today will include Pete Seeger, Mavis Staples, Paul Robeson, Bruce Springsteen and a whole host of others. Tune in on kowsfm.com/listen or download our app.
Two Glasses Joe
We’re heading on over to the Alibi Room, or Red’s Recovery Room, or whatever your local watering hole might be named and we’ll be doing so with the idea that the hair of the dog is what’s in order this Friday morning, recalling if we can the previous night’s bar hop celebrating country music’s favorite songs of cigareets, whiskey and wild wild women. Songs about whiskey and the glasses on the bar where stories and faces go from long to bright as the jukebox fires up. We’ll hear some classic songs from Webb Pierce, George Jones, Roger Miller and Merle Haggard alongside some contemporary sounds from the late Bill Staines, Chris Stapleton, and Dale Watson, all celebrating Johnnie Walker, Jim Beam, and Maker’s Mark…alongside a little bit of scotch and rye…neat or on the rocks. The honky tonk joints we’ll visit will likely have sawdust on the floor and a well-worn bar. Tune for the very best from the past century with your host, Dave Stroud, on KOWS Community Radio.
Hair’s On Fire
It’s summer and what better time to roll out the scorchers; vocals with an emphasis on big beats, screamin’ guitars and performances that sweat quite profusely in the noonday sun. This week on Deeper Roots we’ll be digging through the archives of early rock, rhythm & blues and rockabilly for some tumultuous and head-splitting numbers from the past. Songs that woke up the neighbors if only played at a moderate level and woe be the terrified fifties’ parents when they heard the hi-fi blaring these songs from the youngster’s room. We’ve put together a collection of wildcat tamers, killer dillers, and not a bit of filler in the show today that will leave you breathless. Among those sparking the fuel that could set the hair on fire are Tarheel Slim, Jimmy Breedlove, Chan Romero, Big Mama Thornton, and the one and only Richard Penniman. Tune in for another Friday morning collection of the very best from the past century with your host, Dave Stroud, on KOWS Community Radio.
Saved!
We go back to the church for a rousing celebration for the converted and soon-to-be-faithful. That’s right, we’re in the pews and joining in the hymnal, at least for this two hours, as Sunday morning forgiveness will always follow Saturday night’s sinner’s baptismal. We’re going to hear the echoes of the past century’s gospel songs with a general theme of being saved and born again…and there is certainly plenty to go around whether that’s southern Baptist, Appalachian harmonies or classic African American celebratory gospel. We’ve got it this morning including The Dixie Hummingbirds, Hank Williams, Carl Story, Lonnie Farris, and some contemporary selections from Shannon McNally, Bob Dylan and Solomon Burke. Let’s join in, you the faithful congregation of Deeper Roots from the past century of America’s music, for two hours celebrating that incredible wellspring of gospel sounds.
Flying Home
A fine blend of vintage sounds on the show today, all driving down a free form track. The blend mixes gospel from Mavis Staples, some classic mid-century rock from Little Feat and Rick Nelson, all dressed up alongside to lounge and cool jazz sounds of Frank Sinatra, Lionel Hampton, Pearl Bailey, and a some classic and contemporary tunes featuring the late, great Tony Bennett. We’ve got Zydeco, classic and contemporary country, some alternative sounds from E and the Eels to share as well. We enjoy sharing a mix of the very best in a free form show every month or so and today will not disappoint. There will also be some recent tracks from Sarah Jarosz, Charley Crockett and The Brother Brothers to measure up against the throwback sounds. We’d be glad to have you once again; just dial-up your internet browser to kowsfm.com/listen or, if you’re on the run, take us with you on your mobile device by installing the KOWS app from the Google Play store or Apple App Store.
Celebrating Tom Waits
This week we’ll spend our two hours in a shroud of barroom musk, out-of-tune brass, and painted ladies all spent before the tunes of an American treasure. We speak of Tom Waits. The New York Times, in a review of Barney Hoskyns’ 2009 biography of Tom Waits, Lowside of The Road describes our subject today thusly: “He is as potent and unpredictable a musical force as most of us have witnessed in our lifetimes, and that’s not faint praise. The graveyard croak of his gravelly, bellowing baritone is righteous, paint-scraping, unmistakable; it scatters small animals and slaps your synapses to startled attention. With what’s left of your adrenalized wits, you can attend to his mordant lyrics, which he packs into songs he divides (as his wife, Kathleen Brennan, put it) into two primordial categories: “the grand weeper” and “the grim reaper”. He’s our neighbor here in Sonoma County and we could not be more proud of the boy…really.
Soothe Me
Summer Sun
Summer’s here and you know what that means…we’ll be running through a bit of theme, this time with the focus on all that we celebrate in summer. With the Fourth of July coming up we’ll turn our attention to barbecues, baseball, ice cream treats, the warmth of the sun, swimming holes, and everything summer. Tune in for some terrific tracks from Dean Martin, Johnny Rivers, The Four Preps, Walter Wanderly and a whole lot more. It took us six months for the days to get longer and now it’s another six months of diminished daylight but that’s what make three other seasons something to relish…I guess. So whether you’re shipping kids off to summer camp, planning for this year’s visit to the Fair, or planning a trip to a ballpark or beach, know that it’ll be warmer than colder and we’re here to play the background music here on Sonoma County Community Radio, KOWS-LP, 92.5 FM Occidental, streaming to all over this big blue marble on kowsfm.com/listen.