Get up sleepy heads! West Sonoma County rolls out of bed on a Saturday morning at 9 with LaVern Baker in another episode of Deeper Roots featuring the music of Don Edwards, Jorma Kaukonen, The Boswell Sisters, and Mahalia Jackson (to name but a few). KOWS radio is also propelling itself in an important campaign to extend its broadcast signal to a larger audience across Sonoma County and is in it’s last month of its Indiegogo campaign where we’re asking our listeners to jump into with both feet. Please visit http://tinyurl.com/pom5kkq to donate. You can tune into KOWS on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month to get your regular dose of roots music. And there’s more to discover by visiting our Deeper Rootsweb site.
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.
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.
He was from the Piedmont school of blues guitar but would find a wider audience and following through the work of Taj Mahal, Dave Van Ronk,Bob Dylan, Jorma Kaukonen, Dave Bromberg, and Ry Cooder. The majority of those named actually studied guitar with Davis but his own tutelage was under the legendary Willie Walker. He moved to New York in 1944, preaching and singing on the streets of Harlem, resuming his recording career in the 1960s when his appearances at Newport and other folk festivals brought a seemingly brief fame…but by all indications today, an enduring legacy. If you don’t have his classic album, Harlem Street Singer, produced by Rudy Van Gelder, in your collection…you might want to reconsider. We’ll explore a wide selection of pieces by Davis, by those who influenced him, and the many who were influenced by his music. We’ll also share excerpts of interviews and classic Gary Davis stories by others. It’s a very special two hours on Deeper Roots Radio: A Century of America’s Music with your host Dave Stroud.
We’re sitting in for KOWS’ astrologer Matt Savinar in a show that swings with the jive to open things up and then heads down the path of tradition, New Orleans and zydeco spicing, country swing, and an assortment of gospel classics. In particular, we’ve got sets that are a precursor to our Friday and Sunday night specials about Blind Willie McTell, country swing that opens with the magical guitar work of Les Paul, and we remind everyone that Mardi Gras is just around the corner, with a set featuring Professor Longhair, Eddie Bo, and Snooks Eaglin. Join us in this special two hour ‘stand in’ show.
The railroad is the muse for the morning here in Occidental as the show uses the theme of the railroad: the stories of those who built it, the promise of the golden sunrise that awaits at our destination, the sorrow of a love taken away by rail, and the lonesome whistle from some far away valley. As an aside, did you know that Occidental itself was once a bustling community where the train would haul off the timber and bring tourists from San Francisco and cities beyond?
Join us for the sacred and the secular, including Peter Rowan, ELVIS PRESLEY, Kevin Russell, Paul Warmack & His Gully Jumpers, Furry Lewis, and many others as we explore the genres of bluegrass, blues, folk, jazz, country, and so much more. #rootsmusic#railroad#Americana
Another beautiful winter Saturday morning in West Sonoma County and it’s time for a collection of hot blues, country gospel, early rock, early century pop, and swinging country on Deeper Roots… everything from Eddie Cantor’s 1922 song about a trapeze and Blind Willie McTell covering Jimmie Rodgers around mid-century, to a track from 2014 from a new band out of New Orleans called Hurray For The Riff Raff…another reason our tag line reads “A Century of America’s Music”. Join Dave Stroud on a brisk Saturday morning from the KOWS studios in downtown Occidental, 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.
