Friday, Sept 25 @9am on KOWS
Island of Dreams
No particular destination this week, although we’ll begin on an Island of Dreams. Deeper Roots is going free form once again, rummaging around in the dusty digital archives and following the music wherever it happens to lead us. We’ll start things off with a decidedly British flavor, with Nick Lowe, Martin Belmont & Geraint Watkins, Mickey Jupp and Dave Edmunds before crossing a few oceans, decades and musical boundaries. Along the way we’ll hear vintage country from Johnnie & Jack, Ernest Tubb and Faron Young and some newer music from Charley Crockett and Brandon Flowers. And because the blues are never very far from the heart of Deeper Roots, we’ll spend some time a roster of some of the greats as well as vocal sounds from the likes of the Donays and Cookie & The Cupcakes. It’s another musical road trip with no map and no particular reason to hurry. Join Dave Stroud for Island of Dreams, Friday morning at 9 Pacific on KOWS 92.5 FM in West Sonoma County—and streaming everywhere else on the planet.
Saturday, Sept 26 @3am on KOWS
Blue Moon Americana Episode 579
The hills are showing summer’s wear and the neighborhoods and surrounding deciduous trees are showing their colors. Summer is in full swing although without the inland heat; summer’s offshore fog has delivered a moderate summer. Here on Blue Moon this morning, we’ve got more new music to share including new tracks the past. How about some Little Feat? Leon Russell? Or maybe Garcia & Grisman or John Hiatt is more your cup of tea…well, we’ve got that and a whole lot more. New tracks this week include Valerie June’s latest, Keb’ Mo’, Pokey LaFarge, and Brandon Flowers as we make sure to flavor the vintage with the new, as well as the other way around. KOWS-LP Occidental is community radio for Occidental and we share that music across continents on our stream at kowsfm.com. All of this is packed into two hours on a Thursday (and rerun Saturday) morning.
Saturday, Sept 25 @9am on KOWS
1925 Songs
What did America sound like in 1925? Join us for an encore episode of Deeper Roots when Dave welcomed Josh Rosenthal, founder of Tompkins Square Records, into the studio for an extraordinary musical deep dive. Josh takes us inside the newly minted anthology, Dick Spottswood & Tompkins Square Present…1925 Songs. This 32-track collection spotlights a pivotal, watershed year in American music history—the moment electrical recording began replacing acoustic horns, allowing the vibrant, raw sounds of early jazz, country blues, and hillbilly music to reach a coast-to-coast audience for the very first time. Deeper Roots may be about a century of America’s music… but this week, we’re taking you back a century plus one! Don’t miss it.
Thursday, Oct 1 @Midnite on KOWS
Bourbon Street Rhythms
We enter October with hope. Right? Join us for some sounds from the French Quarter and its environs in a show first broadcast in 2021. Tune in for a sweeping celebration taking the St. Charles trolley in time from Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong to the sounds of Tuba Fats, Mac Rebennack, Allen Toussaint and beyond. We’ll also find some Big Easy rocking treats by the water: Ernie K-Doe, Sugar Boy Crawford, Fats Domino, and Larry Darnell are also on the board from the Big Easy as well as sounds of piano pounders like Archibald, Champion Jack Dupree and Professor Longhair. KOWS radio’s antenna is moving so we highly recommend that you stream us on the KOWS web site (or via the KOWS app) because the FM signal will be out of commission as the transmitter has found a new home out in the hills above Bodega Highway.
Thursday, Oct 1 @9am on KOWS
Saturday, Oct 3 @3am on KOWS
Blue Moon Americana Episode 580
Episode 580! Somehow Blue Moon Americana has wandered, rambled and occasionally stumbled its way through a whole lot of Thursday mornings—and we’re marking this particular milestone the only sensible way we know how: by cueing up another couple dozen tracks and seeing where they take us. This week there’s a particularly healthy stack of new releases, with country, folk, blues, roots rock and singer-songwriters all elbowing one another for a little room. We’ll hear some young voices carrying old traditions forward, a few veterans who clearly haven’t run out of things to say, and more than one song that reminds us there’s still plenty of life left in three chords, a good story and a little twang. And because shiny and new only gets you so far, we’ll rummage around in the back pages as well—pulling out some folk, western swing, classic country and rootsy rock & roll, with a few familiar voices and unexpected detours along the way. It’s less talk, more music, and absolutely no concern for keeping the genres properly separated. That’s pretty much how we got to Episode 580 in the first place.
Friday, Oct 2 @9am on KOWS
Under Western Stars
Saddle up, but don’t expect the usual Hollywood version of the American West. This week on Deeper Roots, we’re heading beyond the familiar cowboy standards to explore the songs, stories and voices that grew out of cattle trails, bunkhouses, chuck wagons and wide-open country. We’ll reach back nearly a century for early cowboy recordings from Carl T. Sprague, Billie Maxwell, Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock and Jess Morris, where ornery horses, stampeding cattle, lousy wages, worse cooking and lonely nights on the trail were simply part of the job. Along the way we’ll discover a West far more diverse than the one portrayed on the silver screen, with music touching on Black cowboys, Mexican and California traditions, ranch hands, buffalo hunters, outlaws and gunfighters. We’ll then follow those old trails forward through Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and into the hands of later storytellers including Ian Tyson, Guy Clark, Mary McCaslin, Dom Flemons, Corb Lund and Colter Wall. Somewhere between history and mythology lies the West that survives in these songs — sometimes romantic, sometimes brutal, often funny and rarely quite what we’ve been led to expect. Join Dave Stroud for a trip Under Western Stars.