This Week's Show: January 28, 2011

This week we continue to bring you the blues as recorded by white musicians influenced by the blues as it emerged from the African American community.  The blues, a truly American music, had its beginnings in field hollers, "arhoolies", prison songs, and work chants and was carried, shared and passed on by itinerant black musicians, railroad workers, farmworkers and others throughout the south in the late 1800's and early 1900's. 

As you'll hear, among musicians the walls of segregation were more permeable than in the general population. The music and the musicians influenced one another all along the way.  This is the way of music and its magic.  Much of what you will hear this week
has both country-folk and blues tonalities and structures rather than being the straight ahead blues that we may be more familiar with.  Yet it was stemmed from the blues and returned to the blues as the music progressed through the years,  re-emerging as "rockabilly" and, eventually rock and roll!

During the show, we'll hear the blues in early recordings of  Jimmie Rodgers, often considered the father of what became commercial country and western music. We'll also hear music that was first recorded in the famous field recordings of Alan Lomax with Wade & Fields Ward.  We'll listen to songs by The Two Poor Boys and the Allen Brothers; Hobart Smith; Frank Proffitt; Lloyd Chandler; maybe some by Arthur Smith and his Dixieliners and the Delmore Brothers; more by Roscoe Holcolm. We'll also hear some by Doc Watson and Jean Ritchie, two of today's more familiar folk artists playing in the traditional style of this strain of the blues,

But first we'll continue wending our way through Columbia's Roots 'n' Blues series with Mamie Smith who is often credited as the first African American to actually record the blues, Papa Too Sweet & Harry Jones, Blues Birdhead, and a 1928 Okeh recording of  Mississippi John Hurt, who was "rediscovered" during the folk music craze of the early 1960's at the age of 70!

This Week's Stories:  "Woodstock!!?  Our first story is our third and last from Pattie Waters of Shelburne Falls.  It is a story about Woodstock--but not what you might guess.  Tune in at about 4:30.

Then at  about 5:30, we'll have the second story of the new series from Nancy Andry's self-published CD, "Winter Lodge." Nancy, storyteller and educator, will tell a Cherokee tale called "Why The Possum Has No Tale".

As always, we hope you enjoy the show.  Drop us a line and let us know!!