Podcasts about Autoharp

A member of country music's legendary Carter Family, the singer-songwriter and five-time Grammy winner was the second wife of country icon Johnny Cash. 

Around campfires North and South, many of the tunes played and sung during the Civil War were the work of a 35-year-old Pennsylvanian who was America's first full-time professional songwriter.By the time the war started, Stephen Collins Foster — who as a youth taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute and the piano — had published more than 200 songs.His best ones — “Oh Susannah,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home (Swanee River),” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Hard Times Comes Again No More” — already were widely known throughout the country to amateur and professional musicians alike.About “Angelina Baker”This song, though, was not one of the famous ones. Foster wrote “Angelina Baker,” sometimes performed as “Angeline the Baker,” in 1850 for use by the theater world's Christy Minstrels troupe.Today folks know it primarily as an instrumental dance tunes performed by old-time and bluegrass bands, almost always with a lively fiddle leading the way. An early version was recorded for Victor in 1928 by Uncle Eck Dunford of Galax, Va. Meanwhile, West Virginia fiddler Franklin George called it "Angeline" and played it with Scottish overtones.Foster's original, though, was a bit slower and had lyrics that lamented the loss of a woman slave, sent away by her owner.Huntington-born music historian Ken Emerson — who in 1997 wrote a definitive biography called Doo-Dah!: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture — said that “Angelina Baker” entered the American consciousness during a period of great controversy between free and slave states. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was among the hotly debated topics at the time of the song's composition, and, Emerson noted, Foster's lyrics obliquely acknowledge these controversies. (Angelina likes th' boys as far as she can see ‘em / She used to run old Massa round to ask him for to free ‘em…. Angelina Baker, Angelina Baker's gone / She left me here to weep a tear and beat on de old jawbone… )Our Take on the TuneThe Flood has always celebrated diversity. The guys often follow a folk blues with a swing tune or chase a 1950s jazz standard with some 1920s jug band stuff. And deep in The Flood's DNA are the fiddle tunes learned from Joe Dobbs and Doug Chaffin. This Civil War-era tune the band learned from fiddlin' Jack Nuckols, their newest band mate.From the Archives: How We Met AngelinaAs reported earlier, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen started 50 years ago trying to draw Nuckols into the band. On an April evening back in 1974, Peyton and Bowen trekked over to Jack and Susie's place in South Point, Ohio, for a jam session. It was during that session that they first heard “Angelina Baker.” Here from the fathomless Flood files is that specific archival moment. Click the button below to travel back 51 years and hear Jack on fiddle, Dave on Autoharp and Charlie on guitar:More Instrumentals?Finally, if all this has you wanting some more wordlessness in your Friday Floodery, tune in the Instrumentals channel in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service. There you'll have a randomized playlist of everything from folksy fiddle tunes to sultry jazz numbers without a lyric or vocal in sight! Click here to give a try. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Shortly after he recorded “Peggy Day” — exactly 56 years ago today, in fact, an appropriate choice for Valentine's Day! — Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine, “I kind of had The Mills Brothers in mind when I did that one.”A laugh was shared by Dylan and RS Editor Jann Wenner over that thought. However, the remark later really would resonate in the world of The Flood, which has taken much musical inspiration from The Mills Brothers, on everything from “Up a Lazy River” and “Lulu's Back in Town” to “Am I Blue?” and “Opus One.”In other words, Floodsters heard in Bob's little-loved love song a kind of pastiche of the 1930s and ‘40s, its rhythms recalling that era's classic swing thing.StepchildStill, "Peggy Day" remains one of the stepchildren in the Dylan oeuvre. In fact, the tune's only claim to fame is that it was the B-side when Bob released "Lay, Lady, Lay" as a hit single in the summer of '69. Unlike a lot of Dylan songs, "Peggy Day" has no intriguing backstory or associated legend, no deep, nuanced lyrics to invite exegesis by college graduate seminars.As a result, some Dylanologists seem to actually hate the tune. “Frankly, embarrassing,” Clinton Heylin once said of it, while Billboard magazine was even cheekier about the entire Nashville Skyline album from which it came: “The satisfied man speaks in clichés,” the magazine purred with a pucker.Shout-Out to The FloodNo wonder “Peggy Day” is so seldom performed by other artists. A few years ago, Tony Attwood started covering Dylan covers in a series of articles for his fascinating Untold Dylan web site. When Tony turned to “Peggy Day,” he located only one non-Dylan recording of the song: The Flood's version on its 2013 Cleanup & Recovery album.Attwood was complementary of The Flood's performance on the album, which featured the call-and-response vocals by Charlie Bowen and Michelle Hoge. (Click here to hear it, complete with solos by Sam St. Clair, Dave Peyton and Doug Chaffin.)“It's a jolly bit of fun,” Attwood wrote, “which shows this is certainly a song that has cover possibilities — in terms of a second vocalist — the harmonies in the middle 8 are gorgeous as is the instrumental break.”A Little Sumpin' Sumpin' from The VaultActually, a decade before that the song almost made it onto an earlier Flood album. “Peggy Day” was among the dozens of numbers the band recorded during a 10-hour marathon studio session with the late, great George Walker, an evening that yielded 2003's I'd Rather Be Flooded.The tune didn't make the cut for the album, but since things don't get thrown away much around here, the rendition has been patiently passing its time in The Flood Files, just waiting for this moment to arise.Click the button below to hear this archival “Peggy Day” treatment with Sam's harmonica and Charlie's vocals along with a bevy of late Flood tribal elders, including Joe Dobbs on fiddle, Chuck Romine on tenor banjo, Dave Peyton on Autoharp and Doug Chaffin on bass:Our 2025 Take on the TuneSo, this bit of fluff from Bob's fat and happy country squire days of the late 1960s is one of his least-recorded song, but The Flood obviously has always enjoyed playing it over the decades. Here's a joyous take on the tune from a recent rehearsal, featuring solos from everyone in the room, Danny and Randy, Sam and Jack. Happy Valentine's Day, dear ones!And Speaking of Love…Finally, if you'd like a little more Flood in your day of love, remember The Valentine Blend playlist in the free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click below to read all about it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

All kinds of stories are told at the weekly rehearsals. Some are shared for laughs. Others are merely melodies and improvisations. Some come with pictures. And some — like this one — are the tales that are many times older than all of us.As reported here earlier, traditional versions of “Pretty Polly” were on some of the first discs made by Appalachian musicians at the dawn of the recording industry. These included Eastern Kentuckian John Hammond's "Purty Polly" of 1925 and the "Pretty Polly" versions of B.F. Shelton and Dock Boggs, both in 1927.To read more about the song's fascinating origin story — it goes back nearly 300 years in Great Britain, had immigrated in the U.S. by the early 20th century to be collected by song hunter Cecil Sharp and obtained honored status in the folk song revival of the 1960s — check out the earlier Flood Watch article by clicking here.Floodifying It The Flood's version of this song lyrically follows the well-established narrative of Polly and Willie's fateful night, but melodically it takes a lot of liberties with the traditional tune. The rendition, in fact, is built on a musical idea that dates back a half century to pre-Flood days.When Charlie Bowen and David Peyton were just starting out as a duo in the early 1970s, they discovered that a repeated scale descending from an opening minor chord resonated nicely on the guitar-Autoharp accompaniment to their voices.Over the decades, each configuration of the band has found something new to contribute to this basic arrangement. And it is still happening. Just listen to what Dan Cox and Jack Nuckols brought to the song at a rehearsal earlier this month.More Folkiness?If you'd like more tunes from The Flood's dustier shelves, you can use Flood Watch's resources to find some. Visit the “Tunes on the Timeline” department; click here to reach it.Once there, scroll all the way to the bottom for links to timeless tunes and their stories, from “Barbara Allen” to “Wayfaring Stranger” listed in the Traditional category.Meanwhile, if you'd like to add even a little more Flood folkery to your wintry Friday, don't forget the free Radio Floodango music streaming service, where you can turn on the “Folk” channel for a randomize playlist of tunes.Click here to give it a spin.A Note about The GraphicsFinally, back to the video that tops this week's article, note that the graphics used to illustrate the performance were generated by artificial intelligence. As reported here earlier, nowadays we sometimes use free online AI software called ImageFX to create accommodating art for these pages. In this case, that software was asked to generate pictures that appeared to be in an old-fashioned quilt. Let us know what you think of the results. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

This week, we talk to musician LARRY SCHEMEL (Roky Erickson, Death Valley Girls, The Flesheaters, Kill Sybil) about the Roky Erickson documentary You're Going To Miss Me. We get to find out Larry's path to working with Roky Erickson & what it was like touring with Roky, Roky's family situation, does the film show a fair look into Roky's life at the time, how hard the film is currently to find to view, where we first discovered the 13th Floor Eleveators and what the band meant to us, Velvet Underground, The Nuggets Complation & oldies stations, The Sonics, Forced Exposure Magazine and zine culture, the Elevator's discography, how the band avoided the hippie-trippie music that was being made at the time, the mythology of Roky & his band The Aliens, Roky's mother Eveyln, the mysterious jug members of the Elevators, acid, Cold Sun, electric distorted Autoharp, Roky's Horror Rock, Stu Cook from CCR producing Roky, 415 records, Roky being pulled onstage to sing at a Butthole Surfers show against his will, the chapters that happened after this film ends, how Roky's songs were structured and what it was like to play them & how Roky knew the songs by the first couple notes.So don't fall down on this week's emotional episode of Revolutions Per Movie.LARRY SCHEMEL:Instagram: @larryschemelREVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is through our Patreon at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. By joining, you can get weekly bonus episodes, physical goods such as Flexidiscs, and other exclusive goods.Revolutions Per Movies releases new episodes every Thursday on any podcast app, and additional, exclusive bonus episodes every Sunday on our Patreon. If you like the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing it on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!SOCIALS:@revolutionspermovieX, BlueSky: @revpermovieTHEME by Eyelids 'My Caved In Mind'www.musicofeyelids.bandcamp.com ARTWORK by Jeff T. Owenshttps://linktr.ee/mymetalhand Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

She promised meet him after work, but she never showed up. Disappointed, he did what you do if you're an aspiring composer: He put it all down in a song.A scene like that plays out every day somewhere in America. But it's not every day that the resulting song becomes one of the most cherished tunes of the decade.Coffeehouse Roots“Peaceful Easy Feeling” began life on the cold linoleum floor of a coffeehouse after closing time. It was 1969 and a San Diego hippie by the name of Jack Tempchin was playing a gig in nearby El Centro.“I was single, and I'd made it big with the waitress,” Tempchin recalled to Cathy Applefeld Olson in an article in Billboard a few years ago. “She was gonna take me to her place, so I told the guys I didn't need a ride to the place we were staying. I was gonna be fine. But then she left and never came back.”A stranger in town with no ride home, Tempchin crashed on the coffeehouse's floor, but he couldn't sleep. To kill time, he grabbed his guitar and started composing, writing down some lyrics on the back of one of the flyers for his show. Today that 50-year-old flyer is preserved in Los Angeles's Grammy Museum.Enter The Eagles“Peaceful Easy Feeling” began that night, but it actually was finished in stages, during which time Tempchin made his way to L.A. where he hung out with up-and-coming stars-to-be of California's music scene.He was staying with Jackson Browne at one point when Glenn Frey dropped in and heard Tempchin playing that song. Frey asked if he could record it. “So he recorded it on a cassette,” Tempchin told Doug Burke of the Backstory Song newsletter recently. “He came back the next day. They had already toured with Linda Ronstadt, and he said, ‘I've got a new band, Jack. We've been together eight days, and we worked up your song.' And he played a cassette for me of The Eagles doing ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling.'”It was the first time he heard vocal harmonization of his work. It certainly wouldn't be the last. The third single from The Eagles' 1972 debut album, “Peace Easy Feeling” reached No. 22 on the charts, and today it is still one of the band's most popular songs.Our Takes on the TakeMeanwhile, when that tune hit the radio, Flood co-founder-to-be Roger Samples was just out of school and working at his first social studies teaching job in Pocahontas County, WV.Lonely to be so far away from his own coffeehouse days back at Marshall University — and especially missing his old picking partner Dave Peyton — Rog worked out a tasty solo version of the song. He was still playing it when he came back to Huntington in 1974. By the time of his debut at the Bowen Bashes that autumn, Roger was more than ready to share his arrangement, as you'll hear on this track — with Bill Hoke on dobro and Peyton on Autoharp — recorded at that very party a half century ago:Now Fast Forward 50 YearsThese days to give the tune a new sound, The Flood last week let Charlie's banjo happily trot alongside Jack's drum and Randy's bass, ready to frame the vocals and those sweet solos by Danny and Sam. Oh, and, hey, be sure to listen to the whole track so you don't miss our surprise ending. We wrap up with some old-time music, a little sumpin-sumpin circa 1680. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Music plays so many roles in our lives. It brings us together through live concerts…It can help us change our mood or amplify how we are feeling in a certain moment…And as you will hear in this episode, music has the power to form meaningful relationships and spark joy in people with physical and cognitive challenges. Candace Ukrainetz shares her passion for forming those relationships in this episode of YXE Underground. She is the music therapist at Sherbrooke Community Centre, a long term care home in Saskatoon. Full disclosure...I work at Sherbrooke as its Communications Leader and I have had the privilege of watching Candace for the past eight years create well-being in the lives of residents in her role. Candace grew up playing all sorts of instruments. She took piano and cello lessons as a kid and today can often be seen sitting next to a resident with her guitar or auto-harp in her hands. What Candace really loves to do, however, is sing. She would sing as a kid all through her house and says that singing gets out all of her emotions. Her love of music led down the path of music therapy and the 263 residents at Sherbrooke are the beneficiaries of her gifts.One of the many things I love about this episode is that not only are we shining a light on Candace's work at Sherbrooke but also the role music therapists can play in other settings such as hospitals.It turns out March is Music Therapy month.I wish I could say I planned it this way to share Candace's story this month, but I am not that organized. However, I am hopeful this episode will spark a conversation in our Saskatoon community about the benefits music therapy has on people. I met with Candace in Sherbrooke's greenhouse a few days after Valentine's Day. She brought a cart full of musical instruments with her and you'll hear a few during our conversation. You'll also hear some powerful stories when it comes to music making a difference in the lives of people with physical and cognitive challenges and of course why this work means so much to Candace.Thank you so much for listening and supporting a local, independent podcast. Please leave a 5-star review if you like what you hear and don't forget to follow YXE Underground wherever you find your podcasts. Cheers...Eric  Host, Producer, Editor: Eric AndersonTheme Music: Andrew DicksonWebsite: https://www.yxeunderground.com

Heute stellt Mine den US-amerikanischen Künstler Marques Toliver vor. Den zieht es aus Florida in die weite Welt. Immer dabei: seine zahlreichen Instrumente. Darunter ist auch die Autoharp, die es Mine besonders angetan hat. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-mine-marques-toliver-deep-in-my-heart

Heute stellt Mine den US-amerikanischen Künstler Marques Toliver vor. Den zieht es aus Florida in die weite Welt. Immer dabei: seine zahlreichen Instrumente. Darunter ist auch die Autoharp, die es Mine besonders angetan hat. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-mine-marques-toliver-deep-in-my-heart

Heute stellt Mine den US-amerikanischen Künstler Marques Toliver vor. Den zieht es aus Florida in die weite Welt. Immer dabei: seine zahlreichen Instrumente. Darunter ist auch die Autoharp, die es Mine besonders angetan hat. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-mine-marques-toliver-deep-in-my-heart

Heute stellt Mine den US-amerikanischen Künstler Marques Toliver vor. Den zieht es aus Florida in die weite Welt. Immer dabei: seine zahlreichen Instrumente. Darunter ist auch die Autoharp, die es Mine besonders angetan hat. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-mine-marques-toliver-deep-in-my-heart

Heute stellt Mine den US-amerikanischen Künstler Marques Toliver vor. Den zieht es aus Florida in die weite Welt. Immer dabei: seine zahlreichen Instrumente. Darunter ist auch die Autoharp, die es Mine besonders angetan hat. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-mine-marques-toliver-deep-in-my-heart

Die Berliner Musikerin Mine hat ein Faible für ungewöhnliche Sounds und Instrumente. Die stellt sie regelmäßig in ihrer „Sweete Instrumente“ Videoreihe auf TikTok vor. Diese Woche bringt sie Harpeji, Autoharp, Vocoder und Co auch in den Popfilter. In dieser Folge erklärt sie ihren Song „BAUM“, inklusive eines Bass-Synthies mit Eigenleben. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-woche-mine-baum

Die Berliner Musikerin Mine hat ein Faible für ungewöhnliche Sounds und Instrumente. Die stellt sie regelmäßig in ihrer „Sweete Instrumente“ Videoreihe auf TikTok vor. Diese Woche bringt sie Harpeji, Autoharp, Vocoder und Co auch in den Popfilter. In dieser Folge erklärt sie ihren Song „BAUM“, inklusive eines Bass-Synthies mit Eigenleben. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-woche-mine-baum

Die Berliner Musikerin Mine hat ein Faible für ungewöhnliche Sounds und Instrumente. Die stellt sie regelmäßig in ihrer „Sweete Instrumente“ Videoreihe auf TikTok vor. Diese Woche bringt sie Harpeji, Autoharp, Vocoder und Co auch in den Popfilter. In dieser Folge erklärt sie ihren Song „BAUM“, inklusive eines Bass-Synthies mit Eigenleben. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-woche-mine-baum

Die Berliner Musikerin Mine hat ein Faible für ungewöhnliche Sounds und Instrumente. Die stellt sie regelmäßig in ihrer „Sweete Instrumente“ Videoreihe auf TikTok vor. Diese Woche bringt sie Harpeji, Autoharp, Vocoder und Co auch in den Popfilter. In dieser Folge erklärt sie ihren Song „BAUM“, inklusive eines Bass-Synthies mit Eigenleben. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-woche-mine-baum

Die Berliner Musikerin Mine hat ein Faible für ungewöhnliche Sounds und Instrumente. Die stellt sie regelmäßig in ihrer „Sweete Instrumente“ Videoreihe auf TikTok vor. Diese Woche bringt sie Harpeji, Autoharp, Vocoder und Co auch in den Popfilter. In dieser Folge erklärt sie ihren Song „BAUM“, inklusive eines Bass-Synthies mit Eigenleben. Hier entlang geht's zu den Links unserer Werbepartner. >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/musik/popfilter-takeover-woche-mine-baum

Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart" and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There are two Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two . For information on Janis Joplin I used three biographies -- Scars of Sweet Paradise by Alice Echols, Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, and Buried Alive by Myra Friedman. I also referred to the chapter '“Being Good Isn't Always Easy": Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul' in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton. Some information on Bessie Smith came from Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay, a book I can't really recommend given the lack of fact-checking, and Bessie by Chris Albertson. I also referred to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis And the best place to start with Joplin's music is this five-CD box, which contains both Big Brother and the Holding Company albums she was involved in, plus her two studio albums and bonus tracks. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode contains discussion of drug addiction and overdose, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse, child abandonment, and racism. If those subjects are likely to cause you upset, you may want to check the transcript or skip this one rather than listen. Also, a subject I should probably say a little more about in this intro because I know I have inadvertently caused upset to at least one listener with this in the past. When it comes to Janis Joplin, it is *impossible* to talk about her without discussing her issues with her weight and self-image. The way I write often involves me paraphrasing the opinions of the people I'm writing about, in a mode known as close third person, and sometimes that means it can look like I am stating those opinions as my own, and sometimes things I say in that mode which *I* think are obviously meant in context to be critiques of those attitudes can appear to others to be replicating them. At least once, I have seriously upset a fat listener when talking about issues related to weight in this manner. I'm going to try to be more careful here, but just in case, I'm going to say before I begin that I think fatphobia is a pernicious form of bigotry, as bad as any other form of bigotry. I'm fat myself and well aware of how systemic discrimination affects fat people. I also think more generally that the pressure put on women to look a particular way is pernicious and disgusting in ways I can't even begin to verbalise, and causes untold harm. If *ANYTHING* I say in this episode comes across as sounding otherwise, that's because I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. Like all people, Janis Joplin had negative characteristics, and at times I'm going to say things that are critical of those. But when it comes to anything to do with her weight or her appearance, if *anything* I say sounds critical of her, rather than of a society that makes women feel awful for their appearance, it isn't meant to. Anyway, on with the show. On January the nineteenth, 1943, Seth Joplin typed up a letter to his wife Dorothy, which read “I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943. I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.” As you can probably tell from that message, the Joplin family were a strange mixture of ultraconformism and eccentricity, and those two opposing forces would dominate the personality of their firstborn daughter for the whole of her life.  Seth Joplin was a respected engineer at Texaco, where he worked for forty years, but he had actually dropped out of engineering school before completing his degree. His favourite pastime when he wasn't at work was to read -- he was a voracious reader -- and to listen to classical music, which would often move him to tears, but he had also taught himself to make bathtub gin during prohibition, and smoked cannabis. Dorothy, meanwhile, had had the possibility of a singing career before deciding to settle down and become a housewife, and was known for having a particularly beautiful soprano voice. Both were, by all accounts, fiercely intelligent people, but they were also as committed as anyone to the ideals of the middle-class family even as they chafed against its restrictions. Like her mother, young Janis had a beautiful soprano voice, and she became a soloist in her church choir, but after the age of six, she was not encouraged to sing much. Dorothy had had a thyroid operation which destroyed her singing voice, and the family got rid of their piano soon after (different sources say that this was either because Dorothy found her daughter's singing painful now that she couldn't sing herself, or because Seth was upset that his wife could no longer sing. Either seems plausible.) Janis was pushed to be a high-achiever -- she was given a library card as soon as she could write her name, and encouraged to use it, and she was soon advanced in school, skipping a couple of grades. She was also by all accounts a fiercely talented painter, and her parents paid for art lessons. From everything one reads about her pre-teen years, she was a child prodigy who was loved by everyone and who was clearly going to be a success of some kind. Things started to change when she reached her teenage years. Partly, this was just her getting into rock and roll music, which her father thought a fad -- though even there, she differed from her peers. She loved Elvis, but when she heard "Hound Dog", she loved it so much that she tracked down a copy of Big Mama Thornton's original, and told her friends she preferred that: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] Despite this, she was still also an exemplary student and overachiever. But by the time she turned fourteen, things started to go very wrong for her. Partly this was just down to her relationship with her father changing -- she adored him, but he became more distant from his daughters as they grew into women. But also, puberty had an almost wholly negative effect on her, at least by the standards of that time and place. She put on weight (which, again, I do not think is a negative thing, but she did, and so did everyone around her), she got a bad case of acne which didn't ever really go away, and she also didn't develop breasts particularly quickly -- which, given that she was a couple of years younger than the other people in the same classes at school, meant she stood out even more. In the mid-sixties, a doctor apparently diagnosed her as having a "hormone imbalance" -- something that got to her as a possible explanation for why she was, to quote from a letter she wrote then, "not really a woman or enough of one or something." She wondered if "maybe something as simple as a pill could have helped out or even changed that part of me I call ME and has been so messed up.” I'm not a doctor and even if I were, diagnosing historical figures is an unethical thing to do, but certainly the acne, weight gain, and mental health problems she had are all consistent with PCOS, the most common endocrine disorder among women, and it seems likely given what the doctor told her that this was the cause. But at the time all she knew was that she was different, and that in the eyes of her fellow students she had gone from being pretty to being ugly. She seems to have been a very trusting, naive, person who was often the brunt of jokes but who desperately needed to be accepted, and it became clear that her appearance wasn't going to let her fit into the conformist society she was being brought up in, while her high intelligence, low impulse control, and curiosity meant she couldn't even fade into the background. This left her one other option, and she decided that she would deliberately try to look and act as different from everyone else as possible. That way, it would be a conscious choice on her part to reject the standards of her fellow pupils, rather than her being rejected by them. She started to admire rebels. She became a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose music combined the country music she'd grown up hearing in Texas, the R&B she liked now, and the rebellious nature she was trying to cultivate: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] When Lewis' career was derailed by his marriage to his teenage cousin, Joplin wrote an angry letter to Time magazine complaining that they had mistreated him in their coverage. But as with so many people of her generation, her love of rock and roll music led her first to the blues and then to folk, and she soon found herself listening to Odetta: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] One of her first experiences of realising she could gain acceptance from her peers by singing was when she was hanging out with the small group of Bohemian teenagers she was friendly with, and sang an Odetta song, mimicking her voice exactly. But young Janis Joplin was listening to an eclectic range of folk music, and could mimic more than just Odetta. For all that her later vocal style was hugely influenced by Odetta and by other Black singers like Big Mama Thornton and Etta James, her friends in her late teens and early twenties remember her as a vocal chameleon with an achingly pure soprano, who would more often than Odetta be imitating the great Appalachian traditional folk singer Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, "Lord Randall"] She was, in short, trying her best to become a Beatnik, despite not having any experience of that subculture other than what she read in books -- though she *did* read about them in books, devouring things like Kerouac's On The Road. She came into conflict with her mother, who didn't understand what was happening to her daughter, and who tried to get family counselling to understand what was going on. Her father, who seemed to relate more to Janis, but who was more quietly eccentric, put an end to that, but Janis would still for the rest of her life talk about how her mother had taken her to doctors who thought she was going to end up "either in jail or an insane asylum" to use her words. From this point on, and for the rest of her life, she was torn between a need for approval from her family and her peers, and a knowledge that no matter what she did she couldn't fit in with normal societal expectations. In high school she was a member of the Future Nurses of America, the Future Teachers of America, the Art Club, and Slide Rule Club, but she also had a reputation as a wild girl, and as sexually active (even though by all accounts at this point she was far less so than most of the so-called "good girls" – but her later activity was in part because she felt that if she was going to have that reputation anyway she might as well earn it). She also was known to express radical opinions, like that segregation was wrong, an opinion that the other students in her segregated Texan school didn't even think was wrong, but possibly some sort of sign of mental illness. Her final High School yearbook didn't contain a single other student's signature. And her initial choice of university, Lamar State College of Technology, was not much better. In the next town over, and attended by many of the same students, it had much the same attitudes as the school she'd left. Almost the only long-term effect her initial attendance at university had on her was a negative one -- she found there was another student at the college who was better at painting. Deciding that if she wasn't going to be the best at something she didn't want to do it at all, she more or less gave up on painting at that point. But there was one positive. One of the lecturers at Lamar was Francis Edward "Ab" Abernethy, who would in the early seventies go on to become the Secretary and Editor of the Texas Folklore Society, and was also a passionate folk musician, playing double bass in string bands. Abernethy had a great collection of blues 78s. and it was through this collection that Janis first discovered classic blues, and in particular Bessie Smith: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Black Mountain Blues"] A couple of episodes ago, we had a long look at the history of the music that now gets called "the blues" -- the music that's based around guitars, and generally involves a solo male vocalist, usually Black during its classic period. At the time that music was being made though it wouldn't have been thought of as "the blues" with no modifiers by most people who were aware of it. At the start, even the songs they were playing weren't thought of as blues by the male vocalist/guitarists who played them -- they called the songs they played "reels". The music released by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and so on was thought of as blues music, and people would understand and agree with a phrase like "Lonnie Johnson is a blues singer", but it wasn't the first thing people thought of when they talked about "the blues". Until relatively late -- probably some time in the 1960s -- if you wanted to talk about blues music made by Black men with guitars and only that music, you talked about "country blues". If you thought about "the blues", with no qualifiers, you thought about a rather different style of music, one that white record collectors started later to refer to as "classic blues" to differentiate it from what they were now calling "the blues". Nowadays of course if you say "classic blues", most people will think you mean Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, people who were contemporary at the time those white record collectors were coming up with their labels, and so that style of music gets referred to as "vaudeville blues", or as "classic female blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] What we just heard was the first big blues hit performed by a Black person, from 1920, and as we discussed in the episode on "Crossroads" that revolutionised the whole record industry when it came out. The song was performed by Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer, and was originally titled "Harlem Blues" by its writer, Perry Bradford, before he changed the title to "Crazy Blues" to get it to a wider audience. Bradford was an important figure in the vaudeville scene, though other than being the credited writer of "Keep A-Knockin'" he's little known these days. He was a Black musician and grew up playing in minstrel shows (the history of minstrelsy is a topic for another day, but it's more complicated than the simple image of blackface that we are aware of today -- though as with many "more complicated than that" things it is, also the simple image of blackface we're aware of). He was the person who persuaded OKeh records that there would be a market for music made by Black people that sounded Black (though as we're going to see in this episode, what "sounding Black" means is a rather loaded question). "Crazy Blues" was the result, and it was a massive hit, even though it was marketed specifically towards Black listeners: [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] The big stars of the early years of recorded blues were all making records in the shadow of "Crazy Blues", and in the case of its very biggest stars, they were working very much in the same mould. The two most important blues stars of the twenties both got their start in vaudeville, and were both women. Ma Rainey, like Mamie Smith, first performed in minstrel shows, but where Mamie Smith's early records had her largely backed by white musicians, Rainey was largely backed by Black musicians, including on several tracks Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider"] Rainey's band was initially led by Thomas Dorsey, one of the most important men in American music, who we've talked about before in several episodes, including the last one. He was possibly the single most important figure in two different genres -- hokum music, when he, under the name "Georgia Tom" recorded "It's Tight Like That" with Tampa Red: [Excerpt: Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, "It's Tight Like That"] And of course gospel music, which to all intents and purposes he invented, and much of whose repertoire he wrote: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] When Dorsey left Rainey's band, as we discussed right back in episode five, he was replaced by a female pianist, Lil Henderson. The blues was a woman's genre. And Ma Rainey was, by preference, a woman's woman, though she was married to a man: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Prove it on Me"] So was the biggest star of the classic blues era, who was originally mentored by Rainey. Bessie Smith, like Rainey, was a queer woman who had relationships with men but was far more interested in other women.  There were stories that Bessie Smith actually got her start in the business by being kidnapped by Ma Rainey, and forced into performing on the same bills as her in the vaudeville show she was touring in, and that Rainey taught Smith to sing blues in the process. In truth, Rainey mentored Smith more in stagecraft and the ways of the road than in singing, and neither woman was only a blues singer, though both had huge success with their blues records.  Indeed, since Rainey was already in the show, Smith was initially hired as a dancer rather than a singer, and she also worked as a male impersonator. But Smith soon branched out on her own -- from the beginning she was obviously a star. The great jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet later said of her "She had this trouble in her, this thing that would not let her rest sometimes, a meanness that came and took her over. But what she had was alive … Bessie, she just wouldn't let herself be; it seemed she couldn't let herself be." Bessie Smith was signed by Columbia Records in 1923, as part of the rush to find and record as many Black women blues singers as possible. Her first recording session produced "Downhearted Blues", which became, depending on which sources you read, either the biggest-selling blues record since "Crazy Blues" or the biggest-selling blues record ever, full stop, selling three quarters of a million copies in the six months after its release: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Downhearted Blues"] Smith didn't make royalties off record sales, only making a flat fee, but she became the most popular Black performer of the 1920s. Columbia signed her to an exclusive contract, and she became so rich that she would literally travel between gigs on her own private train. She lived an extravagant life in every way, giving lavishly to her friends and family, but also drinking extraordinary amounts of liquor, having regular affairs, and also often physically or verbally attacking those around her. By all accounts she was not a comfortable person to be around, and she seemed to be trying to fit an entire lifetime into every moment. From 1923 through 1929 she had a string of massive hits. She recorded material in a variety of styles, including the dirty blues: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Empty Bed Blues] And with accompanists like Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, "Cold in Hand Blues"] But the music for which she became best known, and which sold the best, was when she sang about being mistreated by men, as on one of her biggest hits, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do" -- and a warning here, I'm going to play a clip of the song, which treats domestic violence in a way that may be upsetting: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do"] That kind of material can often seem horrifying to today's listeners -- and quite correctly so, as domestic violence is a horrifying thing -- and it sounds entirely too excusing of the man beating her up for anyone to find it comfortable listening. But the Black feminist scholar Angela Davis has made a convincing case that while these records, and others by Smith's contemporaries, can't reasonably be considered to be feminist, they *are* at the very least more progressive than they now seem, in that they were, even if excusing it, pointing to a real problem which was otherwise left unspoken. And that kind of domestic violence and abuse *was* a real problem, including in Smith's own life. By all accounts she was terrified of her husband, Jack Gee, who would frequently attack her because of her affairs with other people, mostly women. But she was still devastated when he left her for a younger woman, not only because he had left her, but also because he kidnapped their adopted son and had him put into a care home, falsely claiming she had abused him. Not only that, but before Jack left her closest friend had been Jack's niece Ruby and after the split she never saw Ruby again -- though after her death Ruby tried to have a blues career as "Ruby Smith", taking her aunt's surname and recording a few tracks with Sammy Price, the piano player who worked with Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Ruby Smith with Sammy Price, "Make Me Love You"] The same month, May 1929, that Gee left her, Smith recorded what was to become her last big hit, and most well-known song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out": [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] And that could have been the theme for the rest of her life. A few months after that record came out, the Depression hit, pretty much killing the market for blues records. She carried on recording until 1931, but the records weren't selling any more. And at the same time, the talkies came in in the film industry, which along with the Depression ended up devastating the vaudeville audience. Her earnings were still higher than most, but only a quarter of what they had been a year or two earlier. She had one last recording session in 1933, produced by John Hammond for OKeh Records, where she showed that her style had developed over the years -- it was now incorporating the newer swing style, and featured future swing stars Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden in the backing band: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Gimme a Pigfoot"] Hammond was not hugely impressed with the recordings, preferring her earlier records, and they would be the last she would ever make. She continued as a successful, though no longer record-breaking, live act until 1937, when she and her common-law husband, Lionel Hampton's uncle Richard Morgan, were in a car crash. Morgan escaped, but Smith died of her injuries and was buried on October the fourth 1937. Ten thousand people came to her funeral, but she was buried in an unmarked grave -- she was still legally married to Gee, even though they'd been separated for eight years, and while he supposedly later became rich from songwriting royalties from some of her songs (most of her songs were written by other people, but she wrote a few herself) he refused to pay for a headstone for her. Indeed on more than one occasion he embezzled money that had been raised by other people to provide a headstone. Bessie Smith soon became Joplin's favourite singer of all time, and she started trying to copy her vocals. But other than discovering Smith's music, Joplin seems to have had as terrible a time at university as at school, and soon dropped out and moved back in with her parents. She went to business school for a short while, where she learned some secretarial skills, and then she moved west, going to LA where two of her aunts lived, to see if she could thrive better in a big West Coast city than she did in small-town Texas. Soon she moved from LA to Venice Beach, and from there had a brief sojourn in San Francisco, where she tried to live out her beatnik fantasies at a time when the beatnik culture was starting to fall apart. She did, while she was there, start smoking cannabis, though she never got a taste for that drug, and took Benzedrine and started drinking much more heavily than she had before. She soon lost her job, moved back to Texas, and re-enrolled at the same college she'd been at before. But now she'd had a taste of real Bohemian life -- she'd been singing at coffee houses, and having affairs with both men and women -- and soon she decided to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. At this point, Austin was very far from the cultural centre it has become in recent decades, and it was still a straitlaced Texan town, but it was far less so than Port Arthur, and she soon found herself in a folk group, the Waller Creek Boys. Janis would play autoharp and sing, sometimes Bessie Smith covers, but also the more commercial country and folk music that was popular at the time, like "Silver Threads and Golden Needles", a song that had originally been recorded by Wanda Jackson but at that time was a big hit for Dusty Springfield's group The Springfields: [Excerpt: The Waller Creek Boys, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles"] But even there, Joplin didn't fit in comfortably. The venue where the folk jams were taking place was a segregated venue, as everywhere around Austin was. And she was enough of a misfit that the campus newspaper did an article on her headlined "She Dares to Be Different!", which read in part "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break out into song it will be handy." There was a small group of wannabe-Beatniks, including Chet Helms, who we've mentioned previously in the Grateful Dead episode, Gilbert Shelton, who went on to be a pioneer of alternative comics and create the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Shelton's partner in Rip-Off Press, Dave Moriarty, but for the most part the atmosphere in Austin was only slightly better for Janis than it had been in Port Arthur. The final straw for her came when in an annual charity fundraiser joke competition to find the ugliest man on campus, someone nominated her for the "award". She'd had enough of Texas. She wanted to go back to California. She and Chet Helms, who had dropped out of the university earlier and who, like her, had already spent some time on the West Coast, decided to hitch-hike together to San Francisco. Before leaving, she made a recording for her ex-girlfriend Julie Paul, a country and western musician, of a song she'd written herself. It's recorded in what many say was Janis' natural voice -- a voice she deliberately altered in performance in later years because, she would tell people, she didn't think there was room for her singing like that in an industry that already had Joan Baez and Judy Collins. In her early years she would alternate between singing like this and doing her imitations of Black women, but the character of Janis Joplin who would become famous never sang like this. It may well be the most honest thing that she ever recorded, and the most revealing of who she really was: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, "So Sad to Be Alone"] Joplin and Helms made it to San Francisco, and she started performing at open-mic nights and folk clubs around the Bay Area, singing in her Bessie Smith and Odetta imitation voice, and sometimes making a great deal of money by sounding different from the wispier-voiced women who were the norm at those venues. The two friends parted ways, and she started performing with two other folk musicians, Larry Hanks and Roger Perkins, and she insisted that they would play at least one Bessie Smith song at every performance: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, Larry Hanks, and Roger Perkins, "Black Mountain Blues (live in San Francisco)"] Often the trio would be joined by Billy Roberts, who at that time had just started performing the song that would make his name, "Hey Joe", and Joplin was soon part of the folk scene in the Bay Area, and admired by Dino Valenti, David Crosby, and Jerry Garcia among others. She also sang a lot with Jorma Kaukonnen, and recordings of the two of them together have circulated for years: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonnen, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] Through 1963, 1964, and early 1965 Joplin ping-ponged from coast to coast, spending time in the Bay Area, then Greenwich Village, dropping in on her parents then back to the Bay Area, and she started taking vast quantities of methamphetamine. Even before moving to San Francisco she had been an occasional user of amphetamines – at the time they were regularly prescribed to students as study aids during exam periods, and she had also been taking them to try to lose some of the weight she always hated. But while she was living in San Francisco she became dependent on the drug. At one point her father was worried enough about her health to visit her in San Francisco, where she managed to fool him that she was more or less OK. But she looked to him for reassurance that things would get better for her, and he couldn't give it to her. He told her about a concept that he called the "Saturday night swindle", the idea that you work all week so you can go out and have fun on Saturday in the hope that that will make up for everything else, but that it never does. She had occasional misses with what would have been lucky breaks -- at one point she was in a motorcycle accident just as record labels were interested in signing her, and by the time she got out of the hospital the chance had gone. She became engaged to another speed freak, one who claimed to be an engineer and from a well-off background, but she was becoming severely ill from what was by now a dangerous amphetamine habit, and in May 1965 she decided to move back in with her parents, get clean, and have a normal life. Her new fiance was going to do the same, and they were going to have the conformist life her parents had always wanted, and which she had always wanted to want. Surely with a husband who loved her she could find a way to fit in and just be normal. She kicked the addiction, and wrote her fiance long letters describing everything about her family and the new normal life they were going to have together, and they show her painfully trying to be optimistic about the future, like one where she described her family to him: "My mother—Dorothy—worries so and loves her children dearly. Republican and Methodist, very sincere, speaks in clichés which she really means and is very good to people. (She thinks you have a lovely voice and is terribly prepared to like you.) My father—richer than when I knew him and kind of embarrassed about it—very well read—history his passion—quiet and very excited to have me home because I'm bright and we can talk (about antimatter yet—that impressed him)! I keep telling him how smart you are and how proud I am of you.…" She went back to Lamar, her mother started sewing her a wedding dress, and for much of the year she believed her fiance was going to be her knight in shining armour. But as it happened, the fiance in question was described by everyone else who knew him as a compulsive liar and con man, who persuaded her father to give him money for supposed medical tests before the wedding, but in reality was apparently married to someone else and having a baby with a third woman. After the engagement was broken off, she started performing again around the coffeehouses in Austin and Houston, and she started to realise the possibilities of rock music for her kind of performance. The missing clue came from a group from Austin who she became very friendly with, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and the way their lead singer Roky Erickson would wail and yell: [Excerpt: The 13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss Me (live)"] If, as now seemed inevitable, Janis was going to make a living as a performer, maybe she should start singing rock music, because it seemed like there was money in it. There was even some talk of her singing with the Elevators. But then an old friend came to Austin from San Francisco with word from Chet Helms. A blues band had formed, and were looking for a singer, and they remembered her from the coffee houses. Would she like to go back to San Francisco and sing with them? In the time she'd been away, Helms had become hugely prominent in the San Francisco music scene, which had changed radically. A band from the area called the Charlatans had been playing a fake-Victorian saloon called the Red Dog in nearby Nevada, and had become massive with the people who a few years earlier had been beatniks: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "32-20"] When their residency at the Red Dog had finished, several of the crowd who had been regulars there had become a collective of sorts called the Family Dog, and Helms had become their unofficial leader. And there's actually a lot packed into that choice of name. As we'll see in a few future episodes, a lot of West Coast hippies eventually started calling their collectives and communes families. This started as a way to get round bureaucracy -- if a helpful welfare officer put down that the unrelated people living in a house together were a family, suddenly they could get food stamps. As with many things, of course, the label then affected how people thought about themselves, and one thing that's very notable about the San Francisco scene hippies in particular is that they are some of the first people to make a big deal about what we now  call "found family" or "family of choice". But it's also notable how often the hippie found families took their model from the only families these largely middle-class dropouts had ever known, and structured themselves around men going out and doing the work -- selling dope or panhandling or being rock musicians or shoplifting -- with the women staying at home doing the housework. The Family Dog started promoting shows, with the intention of turning San Francisco into "the American Liverpool", and soon Helms was rivalled only by Bill Graham as the major promoter of rock shows in the Bay Area. And now he wanted Janis to come back and join this new band. But Janis was worried. She was clean now. She drank far too much, but she wasn't doing any other drugs. She couldn't go back to San Francisco and risk getting back on methamphetamine. She needn't worry about that, she was told, nobody in San Francisco did speed any more, they were all on LSD -- a drug she hated and so wasn't in any danger from. Reassured, she made the trip back to San Francisco, to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother and the Holding Company were the epitome of San Francisco acid rock at the time. They were the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, which Helms ran, and their first ever gig had been at the Trips Festival, which we talked about briefly in the Grateful Dead episode. They were known for being more imaginative than competent -- lead guitarist James Gurley was often described as playing parts that were influenced by John Cage, but was equally often, and equally accurately, described as not actually being able to keep his guitar in tune because he was too stoned. But they were drawing massive crowds with their instrumental freak-out rock music. Helms thought they needed a singer, and he had remembered Joplin, who a few of the group had seen playing the coffee houses. He decided she would be perfect for them, though Joplin wasn't so sure. She thought it was worth a shot, but as she wrote to her parents before meeting the group "Supposed to rehearse w/ the band this afternoon, after that I guess I'll know whether I want to stay & do that for awhile. Right now my position is ambivalent—I'm glad I came, nice to see the city, a few friends, but I'm not at all sold on the idea of becoming the poor man's Cher.” In that letter she also wrote "I'm awfully sorry to be such a disappointment to you. I understand your fears at my coming here & must admit I share them, but I really do think there's an awfully good chance I won't blow it this time." The band she met up with consisted of lead guitarist James Gurley, bass player Peter Albin, rhythm player Sam Andrew, and drummer David Getz.  To start with, Peter Albin sang lead on most songs, with Joplin adding yelps and screams modelled on those of Roky Erickson, but in her first gig with the band she bowled everyone over with her lead vocal on the traditional spiritual "Down on Me", which would remain a staple of their live act, as in this live recording from 1968: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me (Live 1968)"] After that first gig in June 1966, it was obvious that Joplin was going to be a star, and was going to be the group's main lead vocalist. She had developed a whole new stage persona a million miles away from her folk performances. As Chet Helms said “Suddenly this person who would stand upright with her fists clenched was all over the stage. Roky Erickson had modeled himself after the screaming style of Little Richard, and Janis's initial stage presence came from Roky, and ultimately Little Richard. It was a very different Janis.” Joplin would always claim to journalists that her stage persona was just her being herself and natural, but she worked hard on every aspect of her performance, and far from the untrained emotional outpouring she always suggested, her vocal performances were carefully calculated pastiches of her influences -- mostly Bessie Smith, but also Big Mama Thornton, Odetta, Etta James, Tina Turner, and Otis Redding. That's not to say that those performances weren't an authentic expression of part of herself -- they absolutely were. But the ethos that dominated San Francisco in the mid-sixties prized self-expression over technical craft, and so Joplin had to portray herself as a freak of nature who just had to let all her emotions out, a wild woman, rather than someone who carefully worked out every nuance of her performances. Joplin actually got the chance to meet one of her idols when she discovered that Willie Mae Thornton was now living and regularly performing in the Bay Area. She and some of her bandmates saw Big Mama play a small jazz club, where she performed a song she wouldn't release on a record for another two years: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball 'n' Chain"] Janis loved the song and scribbled down the lyrics, then went backstage to ask Big Mama if Big Brother could cover the song. She gave them her blessing, but told them "don't" -- and here she used a word I can't use with a clean rating -- "it up". The group all moved in together, communally, with their partners -- those who had them. Janis was currently single, having dumped her most recent boyfriend after discovering him shooting speed, as she was still determined to stay clean. But she was rapidly discovering that the claim that San Franciscans no longer used much speed had perhaps not been entirely true, as for example Sam Andrew's girlfriend went by the nickname Speedfreak Rita. For now, Janis was still largely clean, but she did start drinking more. Partly this was because of a brief fling with Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, who lived nearby. Janis liked Pigpen as someone else on the scene who didn't much like psychedelics or cannabis -- she didn't like drugs that made her think more, but only drugs that made her able to *stop* thinking (her love of amphetamines doesn't seem to fit this pattern, but a small percentage of people have a different reaction to amphetamine-type stimulants, perhaps she was one of those). Pigpen was a big drinker of Southern Comfort -- so much so that it would kill him within a few years -- and Janis started joining him. Her relationship with Pigpen didn't last long, but the two would remain close, and she would often join the Grateful Dead on stage over the years to duet with him on "Turn On Your Lovelight": [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] But within two months of joining the band, Janis nearly left. Paul Rothchild of Elektra Records came to see the group live, and was impressed by their singer, but not by the rest of the band. This was something that would happen again and again over the group's career. The group were all imaginative and creative -- they worked together on their arrangements and their long instrumental jams and often brought in very good ideas -- but they were not the most disciplined or technically skilled of musicians, even when you factored in their heavy drug use, and often lacked the skill to pull off their better ideas. They were hugely popular among the crowds at the Avalon Ballroom, who were on the group's chemical wavelength, but Rothchild was not impressed -- as he was, in general, unimpressed with psychedelic freakouts. He was already of the belief in summer 1966 that the fashion for extended experimental freak-outs would soon come to an end and that there would be a pendulum swing back towards more structured and melodic music. As we saw in the episode on The Band, he would be proved right in a little over a year, but being ahead of the curve he wanted to put together a supergroup that would be able to ride that coming wave, a group that would play old-fashioned blues. He'd got together Stefan Grossman, Steve Mann, and Taj Mahal, and he wanted Joplin to be the female vocalist for the group, dueting with Mahal. She attended one rehearsal, and the new group sounded great. Elektra Records offered to sign them, pay their rent while they rehearsed, and have a major promotional campaign for their first release. Joplin was very, very, tempted, and brought the subject up to her bandmates in Big Brother. They were devastated. They were a family! You don't leave your family! She was meant to be with them forever! They eventually got her to agree to put off the decision at least until after a residency they'd been booked for in Chicago, and she decided to give them the chance, writing to her parents "I decided to stay w/the group but still like to think about the other thing. Trying to figure out which is musically more marketable because my being good isn't enough, I've got to be in a good vehicle.” The trip to Chicago was a disaster. They found that the people of Chicago weren't hugely interested in seeing a bunch of white Californians play the blues, and that the Midwest didn't have the same Bohemian crowds that the coastal cities they were used to had, and so their freak-outs didn't go down well either. After two weeks of their four-week residency, the club owner stopped paying them because they were so unpopular, and they had no money to get home. And then they were approached by Bob Shad. (For those who know the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the Bob Shad in that film is named after this one -- Judd Apatow, the film's director, is Shad's grandson) This Shad was a record producer, who had worked with people like Big Bill Broonzy, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine over an eighteen-year career, and had recently set up a new label, Mainstream Records. He wanted to sign Big Brother and the Holding Company. They needed money and... well, it was a record contract! It was a contract that took half their publishing, paid them a five percent royalty on sales, and gave them no advance, but it was still a contract, and they'd get union scale for the first session. In that first session in Chicago, they recorded four songs, and strangely only one, "Down on Me", had a solo Janis vocal. Of the other three songs, Sam Andrew and Janis dueted on Sam's song "Call on Me", Albin sang lead on the group composition "Blindman", and Gurley and Janis sang a cover of "All Is Loneliness", a song originally by the avant-garde street musician Moondog: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "All is Loneliness"] The group weren't happy with the four songs they recorded -- they had to keep the songs to the length of a single, and the engineers made sure that the needles never went into the red, so their guitars sounded far more polite and less distorted than they were used to. Janis was fascinated by the overdubbing process, though, especially double-tracking, which she'd never tried before but which she turned out to be remarkably good at. And they were now signed to a contract, which meant that Janis wouldn't be leaving the group to go solo any time soon. The family were going to stay together. But on the group's return to San Francisco, Janis started doing speed again, encouraged by the people around the group, particularly Gurley's wife. By the time the group's first single, "Blindman" backed with "All is Loneliness", came out, she was an addict again. That initial single did nothing, but the group were fast becoming one of the most popular in the Bay Area, and almost entirely down to Janis' vocals and on-stage persona. Bob Shad had already decided in the initial session that while various band members had taken lead, Janis was the one who should be focused on as the star, and when they drove to LA for their second recording session it was songs with Janis leads that they focused on. At that second session, in which they recorded ten tracks in two days, the group recorded a mix of material including one of Janis' own songs, the blues track "Women is Losers", and a version of the old folk song "the Cuckoo Bird" rearranged by Albin. Again they had to keep the arrangements to two and a half minutes a track, with no extended soloing and a pop arrangement style, and the results sound a lot more like the other San Francisco bands, notably Jefferson Airplane, than like the version of the band that shows itself in their live performances: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Coo Coo"] After returning to San Francisco after the sessions, Janis went to see Otis Redding at the Fillmore, turning up several hours before the show started on all three nights to make sure she could be right at the front. One of the other audience members later recalled “It was more fascinating for me, almost, to watch Janis watching Otis, because you could tell that she wasn't just listening to him, she was studying something. There was some kind of educational thing going on there. I was jumping around like the little hippie girl I was, thinking This is so great! and it just stopped me in my tracks—because all of a sudden Janis drew you very deeply into what the performance was all about. Watching her watch Otis Redding was an education in itself.” Joplin would, for the rest of her life, always say that Otis Redding was her all-time favourite singer, and would say “I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I Can't Turn You Loose (live)"] At the start of 1967, the group moved out of the rural house they'd been sharing and into separate apartments around Haight-Ashbury, and they brought the new year in by playing a free show organised by the Hell's Angels, the violent motorcycle gang who at the time were very close with the proto-hippies in the Bay Area. Janis in particular always got on well with the Angels, whose drugs of choice, like hers, were speed and alcohol more than cannabis and psychedelics. Janis also started what would be the longest on-again off-again relationship she would ever have, with a woman named Peggy Caserta. Caserta had a primary partner, but that if anything added to her appeal for Joplin -- Caserta's partner Kimmie had previously been in a relationship with Joan Baez, and Joplin, who had an intense insecurity that made her jealous of any other female singer who had any success, saw this as in some way a validation both of her sexuality and, transitively, of her talent. If she was dating Baez's ex's lover, that in some way put her on a par with Baez, and when she told friends about Peggy, Janis would always slip that fact in. Joplin and Caserta would see each other off and on for the rest of Joplin's life, but they were never in a monogamous relationship, and Joplin had many other lovers over the years. The next of these was Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish, who were just in the process of recording their first album Electric Music for the Mind and Body, when McDonald and Joplin first got together: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Grace"] McDonald would later reminisce about lying with Joplin, listening to one of the first underground FM radio stations, KMPX, and them playing a Fish track and a Big Brother track back to back. Big Brother's second single, the other two songs recorded in the Chicago session, had been released in early 1967, and the B-side, "Down on Me", was getting a bit of airplay in San Francisco and made the local charts, though it did nothing outside the Bay Area: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me"] Janis was unhappy with the record, though, writing to her parents and saying, “Our new record is out. We seem to be pretty dissatisfied w/it. I think we're going to try & get out of the record contract if we can. We don't feel that they know how to promote or engineer a record & every time we recorded for them, they get all our songs, which means we can't do them for another record company. But then if our new record does something, we'd change our mind. But somehow, I don't think it's going to." The band apparently saw a lawyer to see if they could get out of the contract with Mainstream, but they were told it was airtight. They were tied to Bob Shad no matter what for the next five years. Janis and McDonald didn't stay together for long -- they clashed about his politics and her greater fame -- but after they split, she asked him to write a song for her before they became too distant, and he obliged and recorded it on the Fish's next album: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Janis"] The group were becoming so popular by late spring 1967 that when Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles' films among many other classics, came to San Francisco to film Petulia, his follow-up to How I Won The War, he chose them, along with the Grateful Dead, to appear in performance segments in the film. But it would be another filmmaker that would change the course of the group's career irrevocably: [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"] When Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Monterey Pop Festival, nobody had any great expectations. They were second on the bill on the Saturday, the day that had been put aside for the San Francisco acts, and they were playing in the early afternoon, after a largely unimpressive night before. They had a reputation among the San Francisco crowd, of course, but they weren't even as big as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape or Country Joe and the Fish, let alone Jefferson Airplane. Monterey launched four careers to new heights, but three of the superstars it made -- Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who -- already had successful careers. Hendrix and the Who had had hits in the UK but not yet broken the US market, while Redding was massively popular with Black people but hadn't yet crossed over to a white audience. Big Brother and the Holding Company, on the other hand, were so unimportant that D.A. Pennebaker didn't even film their set -- their manager at the time had not wanted to sign over the rights to film their performance, something that several of the other acts had also refused -- and nobody had been bothered enough to make an issue of it. Pennebaker just took some crowd shots and didn't bother filming the band. The main thing he caught was Cass Elliot's open-mouthed astonishment at Big Brother's performance -- or rather at Janis Joplin's performance. The members of the group would later complain, not entirely inaccurately, that in the reviews of their performance at Monterey, Joplin's left nipple (the outline of which was apparently visible through her shirt, at least to the male reviewers who took an inordinate interest in such things) got more attention than her four bandmates combined. As Pennebaker later said “She came out and sang, and my hair stood on end. We were told we weren't allowed to shoot it, but I knew if we didn't have Janis in the film, the film would be a wash. Afterward, I said to Albert Grossman, ‘Talk to her manager or break his leg or whatever you have to do, because we've got to have her in this film. I can't imagine this film without this woman who I just saw perform.” Grossman had a talk with the organisers of the festival, Lou Adler and John Phillips, and they offered Big Brother a second spot, the next day, if they would allow their performance to be used in the film. The group agreed, after much discussion between Janis and Grossman, and against the wishes of their manager: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Ball and Chain (live at Monterey)"] They were now on Albert Grossman's radar. Or at least, Janis Joplin was. Joplin had always been more of a careerist than the other members of the group. They were in music to have a good time and to avoid working a straight job, and while some of them were more accomplished musicians than their later reputations would suggest -- Sam Andrew, in particular, was a skilled player and serious student of music -- they were fundamentally content with playing the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore and making five hundred dollars or so a week between them. Very good money for 1967, but nothing else. Joplin, on the other hand, was someone who absolutely craved success. She wanted to prove to her family that she wasn't a failure and that her eccentricity shouldn't stop them being proud of her; she was always, even at the depths of her addictions, fiscally prudent and concerned about her finances; and she had a deep craving for love. Everyone who talks about her talks about how she had an aching need at all times for approval, connection, and validation, which she got on stage more than she got anywhere else. The bigger the audience, the more they must love her. She'd made all her decisions thus far based on how to balance making music that she loved with commercial success, and this would continue to be the pattern for her in future. And so when journalists started to want to talk to her, even though up to that point Albin, who did most of the on-stage announcements, and Gurley, the lead guitarist, had considered themselves joint leaders of the band, she was eager. And she was also eager to get rid of their manager, who continued the awkward streak that had prevented their first performance at the Monterey Pop Festival from being filmed. The group had the chance to play the Hollywood Bowl -- Bill Graham was putting on a "San Francisco Sound" showcase there, featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and got their verbal agreement to play, but after Graham had the posters printed up, their manager refused to sign the contracts unless they were given more time on stage. The next day after that, they played Monterey again -- this time the Monterey Jazz Festival. A very different crowd to the Pop Festival still fell for Janis' performance -- and once again, the film being made of the event didn't include Big Brother's set because of their manager. While all this was going on, the group's recordings from the previous year were rushed out by Mainstream Records as an album, to poor reviews which complained it was nothing like the group's set at Monterey: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] They were going to need to get out of that contract and sign with somewhere better -- Clive Davis at Columbia Records was already encouraging them to sign with him -- but to do that, they needed a better manager. They needed Albert Grossman. Grossman was one of the best negotiators in the business at that point, but he was also someone who had a genuine love for the music his clients made.  And he had good taste -- he managed Odetta, who Janis idolised as a singer, and Bob Dylan, who she'd been a fan of since his first album came out. He was going to be the perfect manager for the group. But he had one condition though. His first wife had been a heroin addict, and he'd just been dealing with Mike Bloomfield's heroin habit. He had one absolutely ironclad rule, a dealbreaker that would stop him signing them -- they didn't use heroin, did they? Both Gurley and Joplin had used heroin on occasion -- Joplin had only just started, introduced to the drug by Gurley -- but they were only dabblers. They could give it up any time they wanted, right? Of course they could. They told him, in perfect sincerity, that the band didn't use heroin and it wouldn't be a problem. But other than that, Grossman was extremely flexible. He explained to the group at their first meeting that he took a higher percentage than other managers, but that he would also make them more money than other managers -- if money was what they wanted. He told them that they needed to figure out where they wanted their career to be, and what they were willing to do to get there -- would they be happy just playing the same kind of venues they were now, maybe for a little more money, or did they want to be as big as Dylan or Peter, Paul, and Mary? He could get them to whatever level they wanted, and he was happy with working with clients at every level, what did they actually want? The group were agreed -- they wanted to be rich. They decided to test him. They were making twenty-five thousand dollars a year between them at that time, so they got ridiculously ambitious. They told him they wanted to make a *lot* of money. Indeed, they wanted a clause in their contract saying the contract would be void if in the first year they didn't make... thinking of a ridiculous amount, they came up with seventy-five thousand dollars. Grossman's response was to shrug and say "Make it a hundred thousand." The group were now famous and mixing with superstars -- Peter Tork of the Monkees had become a close friend of Janis', and when they played a residency in LA they were invited to John and Michelle Phillips' house to see a rough cut of Monterey Pop. But the group, other than Janis, were horrified -- the film barely showed the other band members at all, just Janis. Dave Getz said later "We assumed we'd appear in the movie as a band, but seeing it was a shock. It was all Janis. They saw her as a superstar in the making. I realized that though we were finally going to be making money and go to another level, it also meant our little family was being separated—there was Janis, and there was the band.” [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] If the group were going to make that hundred thousand dollars a year, they couldn't remain on Mainstream Records, but Bob Shad was not about to give up his rights to what could potentially be the biggest group in America without a fight. But luckily for the group, Clive Davis at Columbia had seen their Monterey performance, and he was also trying to pivot the label towards the new rock music. He was basically willing to do anything to get them. Eventually Columbia agreed to pay Shad two hundred thousand dollars for the group's contract -- Davis and Grossman negotiated so half that was an advance on the group's future earnings, but the other half was just an expense for the label. On top of that the group got an advance payment of fifty thousand dollars for their first album for Columbia, making a total investment by Columbia of a quarter of a million dollars -- in return for which they got to sign the band, and got the rights to the material they'd recorded for Mainstream, though Shad would get a two percent royalty on their first two albums for Columbia. Janis was intimidated by signing for Columbia, because that had been Aretha Franklin's label before she signed to Atlantic, and she regarded Franklin as the greatest performer in music at that time.  Which may have had something to do with the choice of a new song the group added to their setlist in early 1968 -- one which was a current hit for Aretha's sister Erma: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] We talked a little in the last episode about the song "Piece of My Heart" itself, though mostly from the perspective of its performer, Erma Franklin. But the song was, as we mentioned, co-written by Bert Berns. He's someone we've talked about a little bit in previous episodes, notably the ones on "Here Comes the Night" and "Twist and Shout", but those were a couple of years ago, and he's about to become a major figure in the next episode, so we might as well take a moment here to remind listeners (or tell those who haven't heard those episodes) of the basics and explain where "Piece of My Heart" comes in Berns' work as a whole. Bert Berns was a latecomer to the music industry, not getting properly started until he was thirty-one, after trying a variety of other occupations. But when he did get started, he wasted no time making his mark -- he knew he had no time to waste. He had a weak heart and knew the likelihood was he was going to die young. He started an association with Wand records as a songwriter and performer, writing songs for some of Phil Spector's pre-fame recordings, and he also started producing records for Atlantic, where for a long while he was almost the equal of Jerry Wexler or Leiber and Stoller in terms of number of massive hits created. His records with Solomon Burke were the records that first got the R&B genre renamed soul (previously the word "soul" mostly referred to a kind of R&Bish jazz, rather than a kind of gospel-ish R&B). He'd also been one of the few American music industry professionals to work with British bands before the Beatles made it big in the USA, after he became alerted to the Beatles' success with his song "Twist and Shout", which he'd co-written with Phil Medley, and which had been a hit in a version Berns produced for the Isley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] That song shows the two elements that existed in nearly every single Bert Berns song or production. The first is the Afro-Caribbean rhythm, a feel he picked up during a stint in Cuba in his twenties. Other people in the Atlantic records team were also partial to those rhythms -- Leiber and Stoller loved what they called the baion rhythm -- but Berns more than anyone else made it his signature. He also very specifically loved the song "La Bamba", especially Ritchie Valens' version of it: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba"] He basically seemed to think that was the greatest record ever made, and he certainly loved that three-chord trick I-IV-V-IV chord sequence -- almost but not quite the same as the "Louie Louie" one.  He used it in nearly every song he wrote from that point on -- usually using a bassline that went something like this: [plays I-IV-V-IV bassline] He used it in "Twist and Shout" of course: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] He used it in "Hang on Sloopy": [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] He *could* get more harmonically sophisticated on occasion, but the vast majority of Berns' songs show the power of simplicity. They're usually based around three chords, and often they're actually only two chords, like "I Want Candy": [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Or the chorus to "Here Comes the Night" by Them, which is two chords for most of it and only introduces a third right at the end: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And even in that song you can hear the "Twist and Shout"/"La Bamba" feel, even if it's not exactly the same chords. Berns' whole career was essentially a way of wringing *every last possible drop* out of all the implications of Ritchie Valens' record. And so even when he did a more harmonically complex song, like "Piece of My Heart", which actually has some minor chords in the bridge, the "La Bamba" chord sequence is used in both the verse: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] And the chorus: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] Berns co-wrote “Piece of My Heart” with Jerry Ragavoy. Berns and Ragavoy had also written "Cry Baby" for Garnet Mimms, which was another Joplin favourite: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And Ragavoy, with other collaborators

Ashland, Ky., native Clyde McCoy and his orchestra recorded this song for Columbia in 1933 and then for the next half century he continued to perform it in front of crowds all over the country. In fact, “Tear It Down” was one the trumpeter's two most requested numbers, second only to his signature song, Clarence Williams' “Sugar Blues.” When Clyde moved from Columbia to the new Decca label in 1935, he re-recorded “Tear It Down” as the A side of his band's first release for that company. While millions of copies of the record sold over the years, few listeners ever knew that Clyde's happy, silly swing number was rooted in a dark and desperate neighborhood downriver in Cincinnati. We'll tell that story in a minute.The Clyde McCoy StoryRivers were a big part of Clyde McCoy's life. When he was 9, he moved with his family from Ashland to Portsmouth, Ohio. There, when he was just 14, Clyde found jobs playing on the riverboats, which in those days still worked the waters of the rural Midwest, southern and border states. He performed on the sidewheelers Island Queen and Bernard McSwain.One of the youngest musicians on the river, he already was a stand-out trumpet player.In 1920 McCoy assembled his first band for a two-week engagement at a popular Knoxville, TN, resort. It was quite a trick; though the guys had never performed together, they proved quite popular and their contract was extended to two months.Then for the next decade, the band mates worked from New York to Los Angeles, honing their chops. It was during this period that McCoy also started using a mute on his trumpet, creating the "wah-wah" effect that became his signature sound, a distinctive musical identification.Lightning finally struck when Clyde and the boys landed at Chicago's plush Drake Hotel. When they played their rendition of "Sugar Blues," the crowd went wild. The song hit the radio. A Columbia Records recording contract followed, and the band was on its way. That first record — with “Sugar Blues” on one side and “Tear It Down” on the other — sold millions of copies by early the next year, no small feat in the depths of the depression.Its success fueled a remarkable 68-year career for the Kentuckian. At Clyde's retirement in 1985, total international sales of that original recording were more than 14 million. Meanwhile, McCoy's "Wah-Wah Mute" was so popular that he licensed the King Instrument Co. to market the device to trumpeters around the world.The Wah-Wah PedalClyde's wah-wah-ishness even traveled beyond the trumpet world to guitarists. In 1967, the Vox Clyde McCoy Wah-Wah Pedal, a significant guitar effect of its time, was invented by engineer Brad Plunkett of the Thomas Organ Co. Original versions featured an image of McCoy on the bottom panel. This branding later gave way to just his signature before the name of the pedal was changed to “Cry Baby.”But What About the Song?So, Clyde and his orchestra recorded “Tear It Down” in 1933, but the song seems to have originated at least four years earlier downriver from McCoy's old Portsmouth, Ohio, home. Now our story needs to jump to the red light district of Cincinnati where a pair of young brothers named Bob and Walter Coleman were fixtures in the dives on George Street.With Bob on guitar and Walter on harmonica, the two often teamed up with a Paducah, Ky., multiple instrumentalist named Sam Jones (often called “Stovepipe #1”).In May 1928, Bob Coleman, under the name "Kid Cole," traveled with Jones to Chicago to record four sides for Vocalion Records. When he returned to Chicago in January 1929, Coleman brought with him both Jones and his brother, Walter, to record four more sides for Paramount, two credited to “The Cincinnati Jug Band” and the remainder to Bob Coleman alone.It was in that session that Coleman recorded what seems to have been his own composition, “Tear It Down.” That side — along with the group's "Newport Blues," "George Street Stomp" and "Cincinnati Underworld"— are among the rarest of all jug band recordings and these days remain prized among collectors.Following Coleman's 1929 release, “Tear It Down” became one of the favorite tunes for jug bands. Jack Kelly and the Memphis Jug Band did it in 1930, as did Whistler's Jug Band (though they called it “Foldin' Bed”). Meanwhile, Sam Jones moved to Atlanta, taking the tune with him. When he teamed with guitarist David Crockett, he recorded it for Okeh Records as King David's Jug Band. And today the song still has game. Back in January 2001, for instance, when the guys of Old Crow Medicine Show made their four-minute debut on the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium, they played "Tear It Down" and received a rare first-time-out standing ovation and a call for an encore.Our Take on the TuneJack Nuckols, an old high school buddy of Charlie Bowen's, has played lots of instruments — fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, Autoharp — and as a percussionist he used to jam with The Flood back in the Bowen Bash days.Last week when Jack dropped in to visit with the band, we immediately drew him into the circle. First, we passed him the house bongos to play, but then when a jug band tune came around, we put spoons in his hands. Jack was rocking it hard, we were digging on those rhythmic riffs and, just as we were fixing to turn it over to him for a solo, darned if those spoons didn't break in his hands. Now, Jack was apologetic, but — as you'll hear — we all thought it was a hoot! What better way to end a song called, “Tear It Down”? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

For this old folk song, we follow the well-established narrative about a love affair that goes tragically wrong, but we take a lot of liberties with the traditional melody. Well, our unique tune goes back the very beginnings of The Flood. When Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen were just starting out as a duet a half century ago, they found that odd string of chords seem to set just right with their simple guitar and Autoharp accompaniment. Since then over the years, every configuration of The Flood has found something new to add to that basic original arrangement. And it's still happening. Just listen to this take from last week's Flood rehearsal and to what Danny Cox and Sam St. Clair have contributed with their solos. 

Americans know “Pretty Polly” as the short, tragic story of a young woman who is lured into the forest and murdered by her brutal lover, who then buries her in a shallow grave and runs away.Actually, though, the oldest versions of this song — which has its origins almost 300 years ago in Great Britain — needed up to 36 verses to tell its grim story.In the original English ballad — called “The Gosport Tragedy” or “The Cruel Ship's Carpenter” — the murderer is a sailor who promised to marry the girl he seduced, but then changes his mind when he learns she is pregnant.  After he dumps her savaged remains in a forest grave, the killer returns to sea where he is haunted by his dead lover. In some versions, the sailor is murdered by her angry spirit; in others, he is driven to madness and/or to suicide.And as is often the case with ballads, the story probably is based on fact.Back in 1979, Professor David Fowler of the University of Washington published research in The Southern Folklore Quarterly arguing that the events of the song actually took place in 1726 and involved a ship's carpenter by the name of John Billson, who died at sea. First printed around 1727, the ballad tells the tale of Billson's murder of his pregnant girlfriend and of his fleeing aboard a ship called the MMS Bedford.Coming to AmericaBy the time the ballad migrated to North America (where British folklorist Cecil Sharp collected versions in the early 20th century), the song had been whittled down to half dozen verses, all without losing any of its emotional impact.  In the United States in the mid-1920s, the song had gained new life as a banjo tune by the time of its earliest recordings, including Eastern Kentuckian John Hammond's "Purty Polly" of 1925 and the "Pretty Polly" versions of B.F. Shelton and Dock Boggs, both in 1927.Curiously, Shelton and Boggs' versions both begin in the first person ("I courted Pretty Polly..."), then switch to the third person for the murder ("he stabbed her to the heart….”)Later, when a couple of first ladies of the 1960s folk revival recorded the song — Jean Ritchie in 1963, Judy Collins in 1968 — their versions featured alternating verses, switching back and forth between Polly and Willie's perspectives. Our Take on the TuneOur version of the song follows the well-established narrative of Polly and Willie's fatal night, but we take a lot of liberties with the traditional melody. Our rendition, in fact, is built on a musical idea that dates back a half century to the pre-Flood days. When Charlie Bowen and David Peyton were just starting out as a duo in the early 1970s, they found that a repeated scale descending from an opening minor chord resonated nicely on the guitar-Autoharp accompaniment to their voices. Since those salad days, every configuration of Floodifaction has found something to contribute to that basic original arrangement. And it's still happening. Just listen to what Sam St. Clair and Danny Cox have brought to the song with their solos on this take from last week's Flood rehearsal.More Song StoriesBy the way, some fans of this newsletter tell us they really enjoy these deep dives into the history of the songs we sing. If you'd like more, click here to browse our growing archive. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

In this episode, Mojo sits down with musician Ginger Ackley to discuss her musical journey, the influence of her upbringing, and her experiences as a pagan artist. Ginger shares her story of discovering the pagan path, finding her muse, and creating music that connects with her spirituality. Join us as we delve into the origins of Ginger's passion for music and her remarkable connection with deity. Ginger Ackley's musical journey and spiritual path intertwine seamlessly, reflecting her deep connection with music and deity. Through her autoharp and inspired compositions, Ginger continues to explore her spirituality and share her joyous experiences with the pagan community. Join Sparrow and Mojo in this enlightening conversation about Ginger's unique musical path and the transformative power of music within a spiritual context. It's All About the Love!

One of the wonderful things about the folk tradition in music is that you learn so much from people you know, sometimes from relatives, but more often from good friends. Terry Goller, a remarkable singer and guitar player who taught our whole community about folk music, was — long before we even formed The Flood — one of those inspiring friends.Terry was on hand for some of the seminal moments in the earliest days of The Flood's history. And in our antediluvian history as well. For instance, as illustrated above, Goller was one of the first to recognize in the late 1960s the budding Autoharp prowess in his good friend David Peyton.And a few years later, Terry was the headliner on that magical winter night in 1971 at Ashland (Ky.) Community College, the evening we have called the genesis of the band. As we noted in an earlier report here, Goller shared the stage that night with Brother Peyton and his partner, fellow Flood co-founder Roger Samples, while Pamela and Charlie Bowen sat in awe in the audience. Not only that, in August 1972, Terry and his wife Pat were at the very first of those “Bowen Bash” music parties where he introduced us to the music of an exciting new singer/songwriter named John Prine, blowing everyone away. Terry always tapped into The Next Big Thing. Working on several popular local radio shows, he also was often teaching guitar at music shops and performing at parties and at local folk venues. Though quite busy, he nonetheless usually had time show us a few licks and to tell us the history of the tunes he was playing. (Yes, our love of musical storytelling owes much to Mister Goller.)Terry died nearly 40 years ago this month, but he's still often on our minds. For example, one of the songs that cropped up at the end of last week's rehearsal traces directly back to Terry and to our earliest days with him. In fact, the very first time we ever heard "Dusty Boxcar Wall," it was being sung by Terry Goller and his buddy Dave Bias in the summer of 1967 at the Summit Coffee House on Marshall University's campus, a beloved venue that Terry himself was instrumental in establishing when he was a sophomore there.About the SongSo the song was very new when Goller and Bias started singing it. Just two years earlier it had been introduced by composer Eric Andersen on his debut album for Vanguard, “Today is the Highway.” It has been said that Andersen was the first of the “new Dylans” among the mid-'60s folksinging upstarts. And about the same time that the original Dylan was settling in and conquering New York's Greenwich Village, Eric was dropping out of college in Geneva, NY, and hitchhiking west to San Francisco to try his luck singing solo in North Beach coffeehouses and seeking out the poets of the Beat Generation. In liner notes for that first album, Stacey Williams said “Dusty Boxcar Wall” was written “on the Bay Bridge between Berkeley and San Francisco,” adding, “Eric had been performing at the Cabale coffeehouse in Berkeley with a city group that did country music, The Snopes County Camp Followers.”Wanting to do a solo with the Snopes group, according to Williams, Andersen wrote “this archetypal song of death, love and separation.” By the way, Berkeley's famed Cabale coffeehouse was founded in late 1962 by folksinger Debbie Green, who later became the first Mrs. Eric Andersen.Our Take on the TuneFlash forward 60 years to the Bowen house.While Charlie has given his new banjo the nickname of “Buzz Kill,” the instrument actually does have its moments, especially when the tune on the table is of the old folksong variation. Here — as Danny, Randy, Sam and Charlie have a go at this classic Eric Andersen tune — the banjo brings an appealing little lope. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Lyle Mays – Lyle Mays Geffen Records | agosto 4, 1986 1 Highland Aire 7:02 2 Teiko 7:21 3 Slink 8:17 4 Mirror Of The Heart 4:58 Alaskan Suite: 5 Northern Lights 3:17 6 Invocation 3:57 7 Ascent 6:58 8 Close To Home 6:10 Acoustic Bass – Marc Johnson Alto Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone – Billy Drewes Composed By – Lyle Mays Drums – Alejandro N. Acuña Executive-Producer – Pat Metheny Guitar – Bill Frisell Highland Pipes [Uillean Pipes] – Patrick Sky Mastered By – Bob Ludwig Percussion – Nana Vasconcelos Piano, Synthesizer, Autoharp – Lyle Mays Producer – Lyle Mays, Steven Cantor Tracks 1 to 7: Recorded 1985 at the Power Station, NYC Track 8: Recorded at Blue Jay Recording Studio, Carlise, MA Lyle Mays Inc. BMI Bill Frisell and Marc Johnson appear courtesy of ECM Records © 1986 The David Geffen Company. 1986 Metheny Group Productions, Inc. ///////////////////////////// CORTINA FINAL Before You Go Street Dreams Geffen Records | Junio 15, 1988 ///////////////////////////////////

Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen to another episode of The Open Mic Podcast! With your host Tom Hirst, brought to you by Richland Source and Newsroom After Hours! This week we have quite the legend on the show, and we talk music, the death of La Luna's shows and politics all in one episode! Aurelio Diaz, AKA Chico's Brother, AKA Mansfield's 5th ward councilman! Aurelio writes his music under the moniker Chico's Brother. His poetically vibrant, lyrically driven songs, over top of autoharp rhythmic strums is definitely not your typical sound. But its stripped back simplicity and passionate transparency is powerfully beautiful. He puts so much care into everything he does, and I think it shines through in all of his music! Im very excited to hear the new music he is in the process of writing!  Aurelio has such a huge heart for Mansfield, and he is constantly pouring himself out for the betterment of the community itself. I' am very proud that I live in the 5th ward where he resides over as councilman. Follow Chico's Brother on Facebook here : Chico's Brother FB Click here to listen to his music on bandcamp : Chico's Brother bandcamp Please make sure to like, share and give us that much appreciated 5 star rating, that i'm sure you will agree, is well deserved! Also if you have instagram, check us out @openmicpdcast Check out The Richland Source for all things happening in the great and beautiful Mansfield Ohio!

We invite you to join us as Rachel, [Cancer (SUN + MOON); Gemini (ASC)], goes on an open heart journey at an open mic in Big Island's precious portal that is the Punaverse.  All gratitude, praises and credit to all the brave earthlings that shared their talent and songs.  Sharing is daring! Featuring: Ejoy, Julia, Rachel, Gabby Holt, Clay, Ravi Dass, Octavio, Ames and several other beautiful beings. References: Portland, Oregon, ELU (Emotional Labor Union), Anuenue Farm, Queen of the Sea, Soil's Daughter, Birthday, and Autoharp. Hit da Space Line: +1 707.780.2266   Art: @astroccult. Conducere: https://linktr.ee/spacecourt.   *Created with iPhone 8, Speakline, Auphonic and GarageBand.

A dark murder ballad for Halloween. Coming together to change the world. Why more people don’t play the autoharp. Welcome to the Pub Songs Podcast, the Virtual Public House for Celtic Geek culture. I am your Guide. My name is Marc Gunn. Today’s show is brought to you by my Gunn Runners on Patreon. Subscribe to the podcast and download free music when you sign up at PubSong.com. WHO'S PLAYING IN THE PUB TODAY 0:20 - SONG: “O’er the Way” by Marc Gunn from St Patrick’s Day (2021) 4:14 - WELCOME -- Remember to Vote! Go to vote.org to check your registration and to register if it is still possible. This election is extremely important to bring balance and integrity back to America. So please will vote on November 3rd. -- Post a review in Apple Podcasts or on your favorite podcatcher. -- Recording with Brazilian Celtic Rock band Tuatha De Dannan. I hope to have a recording to share in the next show. I sang a version of “Johnny Jump Up” called “Jaysus Jump Up” for their upcoming album. -- New videos: Whiskey in the Jar, O’er the Way -- New Irish & Celtic Song Lyrics: O’er the Way, Health to the Company -- New podcasts: Celtic Rock Bonus, Lady of the Lake track by Daimh TRAVEL WITH CELTIC INVASION VACATIONS. Every year, I take a small group of Celtic music fans on the relaxing adventure of a lifetime. We don't see everything. Instead, we stay in one area. We get to know the region through its culture, history, and legends. You can join us with an auditory and visual adventure through podcasts and videos. We’re going to Scotland in 2021. Join the invasion at http://celticinvasion.com/ 8:48 - SONG: “Together” by Marc Gunn from Single for KrabbeConnect Krabbe disease is a rare genetic disorder. It is a severe neurological condition that results from the loss of the protective covering surrounding nerve cells.  Individuals affected by Krabbe disease do not make enough of a specific enzyme. Because of this, Krabbe disease slowly damages the white matter, brain and spinal cord, as well as nerves outside the Central Nervous System. 11:13 - STORY: Coming Together I’ve been thinking a lot about togetherness recently. What does it take to bring people together? What does it take to build a community? I can’t say that I really know. Nor am I any good at it. It makes me think of the presidential race. I will vote for Vice President Joe Biden because he’s a moderate. He has worked for years together with both sides of the political aisle, Democrats and Republicans. He seems to me a return to politicians who aren’t just about creating division. But I don’t know how he will bring people together, or if he can in these partisan times. As for me, I’m bad at it. I posted a new episode of the Celtfather Monthly podcast recently. My primary goal was to remind you to have a moratorium on sharing partisanship on social. Don’t share partisan memes. Don’t share news articles. Instead, just share your opinion on your social media. No sooner had I shared that podcast, when I didn’t follow my own advice. In so doing, I felt like I created division. I want to unite people. But I’m not good at it. I don’t know anyone who is. I know I get overrun by my emotions. I say dumb things in anger. Sometimes I will ignore facts just to suit my belief system. You would think that right and wrong were more straightforward. Black and white. But what’s that line by Obi Wan Kenobi in Empire Strikes Back. It’s not black and white. It’s full of opinion. Because my beliefs are different from yours. I am a Celt. To me that means, we understand what it means to be oppressed. And so we should stand up for others who are also oppressed or fighting for their individual rights, as long as it doesn’t impose on ours. As a Geek, those Celtic beliefs are strengthened by the lessons I learned from Star Trek, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. And by Doctor Who. We are all important, no matter your religion, the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, or what exotic race they come from. They are creatures of this universe and deserve respect. We should celebrate all of our differences. That’s what my next CD, Selcouth, is all about. It’s about being different, and proud of those differences. And not belittling someone else’s. It’s about coming together as a community of people who are different. Who are not like everyone else. We’re Celtic Geeks. Each of us is even different from other Celtic Geeks. But we embrace that difference as a group. I don’t know that this community idea really even resonates with you. I want a better world. And I believe we have the capability to make it better. By working together. By being selfless. By putting my neighbor before my own wants and desires. I feel like that is how we truly come together. But it might just be an idealistic goal that’s not attainable. I don't know. But I feel it essential that we try. 15:31 - SONG: “Health to the Company” sung by Marc Gunn, recorded by Brobdingnagian Bards from Real Men Wear Kilts 18:42 - JOIN THE PUB CHAT (read and see videos at bottom of notes) Are you a Celtic Geek? Well, then you probably read. You might study history. And you might watch TV or movies with a Celtic or Geek twist. It’s what Celtic Geeks do. What are you reading, learning, or watching? You can send a written comment along with a picture of what you’re enjoying to marc@marcgunn.com. Chat in the Celtic Geeks group on Facebook. 23:32 - SONG: “Just A Hero” from Selcouth Sometimes we fabricate heroes to satisfy our own dissatisfaction. The mudders of Canton do that in the episode “Jaynestown” on the TV show Firefly. They take a horrible person, Jayne Cobb, who did one good thing for them and put him up on a pedestal. This song continues the story. The mudders realize they don’t need a statue. They can stand up for themselves. They become their own heroes. 26:56 - UPCOMING SHOWS THURS: Coffee with The Celtfather on YouTube @ 12:00 PM Eastern OCT 17: The Lost Druid in Decatur, GA @ 7:00 - 9:00 PM EDT OCT 22: Celtfather Live on YouTube @ 8:00 - 9 PM EDT. This is not a public concert. You can buy Tickets right now for just $8. Find details in the shownotes. 28:33 - SUPPORT WHAT YOU LOVE If you enjoy the music in this show, please show your support. Buy music or merch. Follow me on streaming. And tell a friend. Streaming music gives you a quick and easy way to sample my 23 albums. Digital sales keep my business running. Tips and CD sales allow me to tour and have online concerts. Kickstarter funds the production of physical products like CDs, shirts, and other merch. And Patreon funds my songwriting! Join the Gunn Runners Club on Patreon. Your support pays for the production and promotion of my music and this podcast. Follow the link in the shownotes. Special thanks to my newest patrons: LP Chan, Minchowski, Rebekah Martin, Carol Donahue 29:41 - SONG: “I’ll Drink from Dusk Til Dawn” from Happy Songs of Death Pub Songs Podcast was produced by Marc Gunn. To subscribe, go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or to my website where you can subscribe to my mailing list. I’ll email you regular updates of new music and podcasts, special offers, and you’ll get 21 songs for free. Welcome to the pub at www.pubsong.com! #pubsongs #togetherness #krabbeconnect PUB CHAT Any Meerkats wrote: “Why don't kids and teens EVER seem to play the autoharp? When i look on Youtube, it's always older people in their thirties or more. I don't see any youthful looking people playing it. Is it really bad for a kid to play that instrument? Even more weird, I'm 16 and really autistic, so i act like a kid. It somehow fits my weird personality in the most unique way, but most people would only associate the sound as background music for me, they would be surprised if i could actually play it too.” That’s a good question. I know it is a great instrument for kids. But I can think of at least two reasons. First it is typically associated with folk music. Not to say you can’t play anything on it. You can. Look up autoHarpers on YouTube and you’ll find a bunch of younger people playing Pop songs and what not  But it is a stigma. Second, it is a heavy instrument. It might be a bit big for many kids. I do know there is a luthier in California and makes what’s called the sparrow autoharp. It is smaller and lightweight. Not the best sound as far as I’m concerned, but it’s a great introductory instrument. I taught at the California autoharp gathering a few years back. They do a lot of youth outreach. We taught some kids. But even there it seems most kids probably would rather learn to play the guitar. I’m with you though. I love the sound of the instrument but I also feel like it fits my weird personality. I love that I play an instrument that few other people play. And I can also honestly say that no one in the world plays the autoharp like I do. My suggestion is that you just start playing it. Figure out its strengths and weaknesses. Make it your own. You can do some brilliant things on the instrument. Find out more about Autoharp music here.  

Darryl Bush is on The Front Porch with his flavor and love of Old Time Music. He is a multi -Instrumentalist, who plays for dances in the region and at festivals like Crook Farm.. Darryl plays a selection of Banjo and Autoharp songs songs about Bonapart, murder ballads and Child Ballads.

Ready, Set, Imagine! Enjoy the podcast version of our Instagram Live @creativepois_on interview with International Singer-Songwriter Alessandra Salerno https://www.alessandrasalerno.com Our Editor in Chief Tommaso Cartia - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommaso-cartia-24593035/ interviews the artist for Creative Pois-On #CreativityWillSaveUs Phase 2 series. Alessandra Salerno's song - Faith Within Your Hands - is the official soundtrack of the series.

This week Seb and Verity have a hotline to Canada to chat to critically acclaimed singer/songwriter Basia Bulat.Basia talks all about her fantastic new album "Are You in Love?", which was partly recorded at Joshua Tree and led to some integral collaborations with both the wind and desert dust.They chat improvising at festivals, Bach and Basia indulges Verity’s new found love of the autoharp by demonstrating a few of her favourites.Towards the end of their conversation, Basia performs the title track from her new album... it’s a stunning rendition and not to be missed./ / /SHOW NOTESTwitter: @BasiaBulatInstagram: @basiabulatBASIA BULAT'S WEBSITE"ARE YOU IN LOVE?" - APPLE MUSIC / SPOTIFYJIM JAMESMONTREAL JAZZ FESTIVALAUTOHARPSBASIA BULAT AT SERVANT'S JAZZ QUARTERS, LONDON/ / /Subscribe to:THREE IN A BAR'S EXCELLENT SONGS (SPOTIFY PLAYLIST) Click here to join the Members' Club on Patreon! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

American pop songwriting genius Stephin Merritt discusses quarantine life in New York City, each and every song on the new album Quickies by the Magnetic Fields, and more! Supported by Live at Massey Hall, Pizza Trokadero, the Bookshelf, Planet Bean Coffee, and Grandad's Donuts. Please take this listener survey. 

Alice Rose is a Danish singer, songwriter, viola player, electronic musician, autoharpist and explorerer of inner and outer worlds. She plays and sings beautiful, mesmerizing and thoroughly modern music that captures the essence of the old world and the new. Hailing from Copenhagen, Denmark, Alice Rose started travelling the world at a young age, and took her art with her wherever she went. She created her own style of music, juggling with viola, voice loopstation, beat boxes, keyboards and toys–all together in a delicious concoction of electro-folk, equal parts trip-hop, pop, electronica and dance. Alice Rose now has a base in Berlin. Here she's playing on the streets, in bars, living rooms and at events and festivals. Torn and united, calm and wild, rich and poor, grey and colourful, metropolis and village, big and small. She is using the city as her mirror and at the same time her unruly, chaotic base, and the music is the place where she rests. It is here that she picked up the Autoharp. The Autoharp is an american instrument, used mainly in bluegrass and country music, and with it’s angelic chord progressions, Alice has learned to play it beautifully and now combines it with her other styles. Together with her Scandinavian voice: soft, raw, angelic, and her profound lyrics, she touches the listener straight in their core.With her clear voice, heartfelt lyricism and minimal sound, she has created harmonic and inspiring music, in a world full of chaos. “What To Do In The Rain“ is her newest album: soft, harmonic, ambient and raw, a poetic, in-depth album with lyrics of profound depth and clarity, where 12 songs weave stories of love and longing. The album is co-produced by the talented artist, Jamie Collier, from New Zealand, and is played entirely with handmade instruments, and mastered on tape. The two collaborators are now in the pre-production for the next Alice Rose album, ‘While The Moss Redeems The Stone’. Alice is also deeply embedded in the underground improvisation dance scene with her melodies, soundscapes and beats, keeping the dancer’s hearts open, their practice alive and fluid with her impromptu compositions played on her viola and loop machine. Her curiosity has moved her to travel the world with long stays in conscious communities in India and Thailand, sharing her magic with an international audience. Now with the first movie score credits to her name and live TV appearances in her native country (Alice is featured in the TV show, ‘Denmark’s Got Talent’), Alice Rose continues to courageously open her heart to an ever expanding audience. Find yourself lost and uplifted in one of her 5 albums, or even better! Go catch on of her shows if you can!

In this bonus episode of Psychotropic, we listen to Adrianne, Tyler, and Nick as they talk about their new film DOSED. Directed by Tyler Chandler, the film follows Adrianne, a suicidal woman who has struggled with depression, anxiety, and opioid addiction. After years of prescription medications failing her, Adrianne turns to the world of underground healers where plant medicines are redefining our understanding of mental health and addiction. Through Adrianne’s very personal journey on film, DOSED shows firsthand how psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms and iboga can improve the lives of millions and potentially bring an end to the opioid crisis.  Through our interview, we hear about how Adrianne’s addiction to opiates began, how her addiction evolved, as well as her time as the subject of DOSED. We also hear from Tyler and Nick about what it was like directing, shooting, and producing DOSED. Be sure to check out DOSED by going to www.dosedmovie.com to rent or buy. If you purchase the film before April 2nd, ten percent of the proceeds will go towards the Coronavirus Disaster Relief Fund as well as be matched by Facebook. If you’d like to reach out to Psychotropic and share a story, or just say what’s on your mind, email psychotropicpodcast@hotmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Drugs Mentioned: Alcohol, Cocaine, Heroin, Percocet, Morphine, Fentanyl, Methadone, Magic Mushrooms (Psilocybin), Iboga Music Featured: “Beautiful Bell Forest Delay Melt” by Vox Mod, “Autoharp” by Hale, and “Love Until the End” by Matt Wigton

OUR BELOVED GUITAR HAS BEEN RECOVERED! Big thank you to Jawah Scott at Birchwood Cafe for getting in touch after recovering it this past weekend. However, as we didn't have it back in time for this morning's show, please enjoy a rendition of "Silent Night" with Lekter on the Autoharp and Wheeler on "cluckals."

Episode 99 Dante Villagomez: Singing Bowl, Autoharp and Woodblocks Night at Sea is an ambient electronica music podcast aiming to shift the mind towards the land of Nod. Collaborating with local Pittsburgh musicians and artists, Spices Peculiar presents a weekly improvised sleep aid. New episode uploaded every Tuesday @ 10:30 P.M. Each episode is recorded live and produced by Dante Villagomez Explore the full array of music, videos, and art at www.spicespeculiar.com/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/spicespeculiar/ "Coastline," the mediation-oriented EP is now available via spicespeculiar.bandcamp.com/ "Slow Chance" is a slow rhythmic journey of the PO-12 and Pocket Piano, fueled by the change of pace from Pittsburgh's winter to a Guadalajara spring. Full EP release 7/9/19

I had so much fun talking with Caroline Johnson about music and creativity! Caroline Johnson has had the good fortune of enjoying not one, but two creative careers doing what she loves — first as a journalist, then as a music teacher. She studied at the University of Tulsa, earning a bachelor of science in journalism education and a master’s of art in writing. She also has sung in church choirs for more than 50 years as well as Tulsa Oratorio Chorus, Tulsa Opera Chorus and The Tonics folk rock group. She worked as a feature writer for The Tulsa Tribune for more than a decade, then was invited to “bring your Autoharp, teach some music and help out around the office” in the early years of Riverfield Country Day School. She retired there, 27 years later, having taught in the preschool through middle school. Caroline continues to enjoy writing with her cottage company called “Write for You,” interviewing clients, writing their obituaries and helping them plan memorial services. Fill up your DoYouMind.life mug and join me, Stacey Leigh, for a conversation with Caroline! For articles, links to podcasts, merchandise, and more, check out our website at www.DoYouMind.life! Don't miss any of the inspiring DoYouMind.life content! To receive the weekly DoYouMind.life Saturday Summary email, click here. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, we invite you to subscribe and write a review on Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Better yet, pop over to Patreon to become a financial supporter of the doyoumind.life project. Patrons receive the weekly Saturday Summary, special insider access, and DoYouMind.life swag to connect and inspire them. For about the price of a latte, $5 per month, you can become a patron at the not-a-latte tier. At $15 per month, you can join the Coffee Klatch and receive a DoYouMind coffee mug just like the ones given to our podcast guests, a podcast dedicated to you or a loved one, and other gifts. At $40 per month, you’re Serving from the Saucer, and in addition to these gifts, you get a membership box mailed to your home each month filled with goodies to connect and inspire you, plus a shout-out for your favorite charity on a future podcast episode. Please visit www.patreon.com/doyoumind to learn more.        

Episode 56 Dante Villagomez: Pocket Piano Synth, PO-12, Singing Bowls, Shakers, Bells, Woodblocks, Cowbells, Autoharp, and Congas Night at Sea is an ambient music podcast aiming to shift the mind towards the land of Nod. Collaborating with local Pittsburgh musicians and artists, Spices Peculiar presents a weekly improvised sleep aid. New episode uploaded every Tuesday @ 10:30 P.M. Each episode is recorded live and mixed the week of release by Spices Peculiar Explore the full array of music, videos, and art at spicespeculiar.com "Coastline," the mediation-oriented EP is now available via spicespeculiar.com

Episode 52 Dante Villagomez: Pocket Piano, Singing Bowls, and Bells Bixoma: Wood Blocks, Cowbells, Autoharp, and Shakers follow Bixoma on instagram @bixoma Night at Sea is an ambient music podcast aiming to shift the mind towards the land of Nod. Collaborating with local Pittsburgh musicians and artists, Spices Peculiar presents a weekly improvised sleep aid. New episode uploaded every Tuesday @ 10:30 P.M. Each episode is recorded live and mixed the week of release by Spices Peculiar Explore the full array of music, videos, and art at spicespeculiar.com "Coastline," the mediation-oriented EP is now available via spicespeculiar.com

Instrumentation: Pan Flutes, Singing Bowls, Autoharp, Dvojnice, Pocket Piano Synth, Camel Bells, and Whistles This is NOT a Night at Sea Podcast Episode but rather a short track off Spices Peculiar's upcoming meditation-oriented EP "Coastline." “Coastline” now available via https://spicespeculiar.bandcamp.com/album/coastline Thank you all for the continued support throughout this podcast's debut year. My expectations were far exceeded with the amount of support and feedback I received. Cheers! -Dante Villagomez of Spices Peculiar

"Slainte mhaith". That means "here's to your good health". "Slainte" means "cheers" or "here's to your health". "Mhaith" is good. Greetings my name is Marc Gunn. I play Celtic Geek music. I'm originally from Texas, though now residing in Birmingham, Alabama. Despite that introduction, I don't speak Gaelic. But I love Celtic culture and music. And yes, I am a geek. My entire life revolves around music, science fiction and fantasy, traveling, and Celtic culture. Welcome to Celtfather Music & Travel! This is a podcast where I bring my passions together. I rarely follow the status quo. In fact, you could say I strive to be different. You can hear in in that I play an autoharp. And I celebrate the differences of all people. I fight for the underdogs. In fact, when I was a kid my dad would watch football. I would root for the team that was losing, even if that changed in the middle of the game. I just switched team. I try to help out the little guy. Hmm I wonder if that's part of the reason I love Firefly. And that's what the next few episodes are all about. We're gonna start with music: how I fell in love with it and how it completes me. Then we're gonna talk about some of the biggest influences in my life. As a hint, it started on the big screen. Then I'll share with you how I fell in love my Celtic culture. And finally, I'm gonna take you on a trip, both literally and figuratively, as we explore how I fell in love with traveling. Before we dig deeper, I want to share with you a quick glimpse of what I have to offer you. I learned at the beginning of my music career that if I want to make it in the music business, I had to be more than just a musician. I knew that no record label was gonna sign me as a Celtic artist, let alone a Celtic Geek musician. If I want to be successful, then I need to know how to promote my music, and I need people like you to not just listen, but be an active part of our community. More than likely, you've never thought of yourself as a Celtic Geek. Perhaps you love Celtic music. Perhaps you are a Geek. But the two together don't make much sense on the outside. And yet, when I when I went to my first science fiction convention, I-Con in Stony Brook, New York, I was dumbfounded by the number of kilts and Celts at the convention. I realized there were a lot of Celtic Geeks out there. I was not alone. But no one had yet put two and two together. So I created an album that I call Celtic Geek. It features 21 songs from my first 20 albums. You'll hear some traditional Irish and Scottish songs. You'll laugh along to some parodies of those same songs. You'll breathe peacefully with some instrumental tunes on the autoharp. You'll smile to original songs inspired by science fiction and fantasy. It's a fun album. It's 100% free to you when you subscribe to my mailing list. Some musicians cling their music to their chests. The only way you can hear it is if you buy a CD. That is not me. I learned long ago that if I want to be successful with music, then I have to let go. I have to let you be a part of the music. Not just listen to it. But to be involved in it. So I share my music freely. I offer free licenses for podcasters to play music on their shows. I encourage you to share my songs and CDs with your friends. I want you to send me your song lyrics. I've recorded a number of songs by fans. I want you to record your own version of my songs or to sing them around the campfire or the water cooler. No, I'm not gonna sue you if you copy an album and give it to someone. I want you to. It turns out, I was right to have this philosophy. Because now with streaming services, anyone can listen to my music for virtually free. You'll find me on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Google Play, Pandora, pretty much everywhere online. And I want you to listen. Yes. Please follow me on Spotify or whatever streaming service you're on. Those services are doing me a great favor. They are getting my music heard. Anonymity is my greatest challenge. But streaming music helps me overcome that. You can listen for free. Sure, I won't begrudge you if you decide to go to CelticMusic.org to buy digital downloads or a CD. I would love it. But I don't expect it. My hope is that you love my music so much that it inspires you... to listen, to share it, to try and watch a live show, to sing or play along, and well, to be a better, happier person. I want you to have a little bit more fun in your life. I try to make it easy for you too. Right now, I have weekly live streaming concerts online. In fact, I have two shows at present. On Monday, you can hear me sing a couple songs and catch up on my latest news on my YouTube channel. On Wednesday, I have a series I call Coffee with The Celtfather. It's a longer show featuring some of your requested songs. If that's not enough, once a month, I also host an evening live streaming concert on YouTube. Sometimes it is publicly available. Other times, it is an exclusive benefit for my Heroes in the Gunn Runners Club on Patreon. These are great ways to get to know me and my music in a more personal setting. But there are other ways, including podcasting. You see, I was one of the first podcasters in the world. I started Irish & Celtic Music Podcast in the summer of 2005. It originally came out about every 3-4 weeks, at least until I found Patreon in 2014. That changed everything, including the podcast. It became a weekly show featuring the best independent Celtic music online. It's won three podcasting awards and has become a hallmark of my music career. I've publish a lot of different podcasts over the years. Go to MageNetwork.com. You'll find many of those that are still around. But my latest podcast is this one, Celtfather Music & Travel. I try to offer a bigger look at my music and travels through it. I also have two different podcasts exclusively available through the Gunn Runners Club on Patreon, which give a behind-the-scenes look at my music as well as stories from the road. Of course, I have a blog. You'll find me regularly posting on Facebook, and occasionally posting on InstaStories on Instagram. I'm attempting to write non-fiction books designed to help my fellow musicians and others. If all that wasn't enough to keep me busy, I am also the father of two beautiful girls and husband to a wonderful wife. You'll see them included in several of the videos I share. Maybe it's my Dungeons & Dragons upbringing, but I feel like an adventurer at heart. You'll see that in my travel videos on YouTube. I wanted a fun way to share my songs. So I started adding video on top of them from my Celtic Invasion Vacations. Every year, I take a small group of people to Europe, and other places. But primarily we go to the Celtic nations: Ireland and Scotland. We've also been to Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and Italy. I don't know if you've ever done a European tour, but this is nothing like those. This a more personal and more flexible trip. Instead of doing 20 cities in 10 days, we stay in one place for seven days. We get to know the region and the people. It's a relaxing adventure that's more about the community than the place. That's why it's called Celtic Invasion... Vacations. You should feel rested at the end of your trip. There's one more thing that I want to share about my music. That's my instrument. I play the autoharp. Most people have a vague idea of what the autoharp is. You probably remember it from second grade music class, if at all. But I am one of the handful of people who play the instrument, as my primary instrument, professionally. Yes. It's very simple to start playing. Just press a button and strum. But you can do so much more with it with a little work. Just listen to my music. I think you'll hear that. In fact, I think now is a good time to let you go and listen to my music. If you're not yet following me on Spotify or subscribed to my newsletter, go ahead and do that right now. But I will also include a link to listen to my Celtic Geek album for free. Stream it from wherever you are right now.  Then let me know what you think. I love your thoughts and feedback. Now that I've introduced myself to you. I'd like to hear from you. Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do? Do you play music or sing? If so, what instrument? How did you find my music? What other music to listen to? Tell me about yourself and email me at marc@marcgunn.com Thank you so much for joining me on this Celtic Geek journey. I hope my music brings you lots of fun and happiness. Slainte! --- If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more, subscribe at celtfather.com.

Halloween is just around the corner. I'm celebrating with my 5th annual Celtic Halloween Music Special on YouTube and by sharing my album Happy Songs of Death, in its entirety. You can watch my live streaming concert this Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 8:30 PM. Find out more on my song about Bugs Bunny and Witch Hazel. If you enjoy this show, LIKE it, SHARE it, post in the comments, or tell a friend. Then subscribe to the podcast and my mailing list at http://pubsong.net/ WHO'S PLAYING IN THE PUB TODAY? Today, we're playing my CD Happy Songs of Death from start to finish. Isn't It Grand, Boys? Won't You Come with Me? (Gunn) Twa Corbies Clementine Blues Johnny Jump Up Jug of Punch Red, Red and Black (Gunn) Whiskey, You're the Devil High Jeannie High Rosin the Bow Foggy Dew (Kearney/O'Neill) Waxies Dargle I'll Drink from Dusk ‘Til Dawn (Gunn) All songs traditional, except as noted. Instruments: Marc Gunn (autoharp, vox), Ari Koinuma (guitar, mandolin, percussion, bkg vox), Jamie Haeuser (bodhran, bkg vox), Mike Younger (bkg vox). Produced by Ari Koinuma. Graphics by Ingrid Houwers and Nikki O'Shea. If enjoy this album, please support the musicians who support this podcast, buy the CD, follow me on Spotify, and share the show. Pub Songs Podcast was produced by Marc Gunn. To subscribe, go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or to our website where you can join the Gunn Runners Club for as little as $1 per month to support my music. You can get regular updates of new videos, podcasts, lyrics, stories behind the songs, plus 21 songs for free at www.pubsong.net.   THANK YOU PATRONS I want to thank everyone in the Gunn Runners Club on Patreon. There are 144 people who pledge a $1 or more per month so that I can keep creating new music and entertainment for you. You are amazing. I want to thank my newest Gunn Runners: Anna N., Randy B., Jeff H., Christopher K., Cora B., Kerrie B., Rich, Erica T., Kelira, Hiram W, Muzikana, Riva l, William M., Garrett R, Kristin T., Patricia C., Craig, Chrystin P.. Also a huge thanks to Carol B., Scott & Anita G., Jessica C., Jenn W., Kimber, Rob W. who raised their pledge I was looking recently and I realized just how incredible membership in the club is. You'll get several albums of my music, videos, exclusive podcasts, and of course you're supporting this podcast as well as Celtfather Music & Travel. But you can also get discounts on merch, sheet music, and bootleg recordings. It's packed for just dollars per month. If you enjoy what I do, please consider making a pledge. Go to marcgunn.net to express your generous nature today! PUB TALK Welcome to the Pub Songs Podcast. Yes, the name changed... again. And actually, for the foreseeable future, I'm not running regular shows. I'm gonna do something scary, that I've thought about for a long time. I'm gonna share each of my albums in full, from start to finish, Of course, you can already stream all my music on Spotify, Google Play, Amazon Music, and lots other places. But now I’m going to share the show the podcast form as well. Back in the 70s, DJs played entire albums from start to finish. I decided to do that on the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast. It was a great success for several artists. But I'm just like all artists. I get nervous about giving everything all my music away for free... even if I know it's a smart marketing move. I learned this lesson years ago on MP3.com. Since Halloween is just around the corner, it seemed appropriate to release my Happy Halloween Songs of Death as it could be called. Or for the ones you know my music Happy Songs of Death. This album was first released on August 20, 2009. It  was produced by Ari Koinuma. He provided all of the background instrumentation. I did have some guest vocalists including Michael Younger, who died before the release of the album. It is dedicated to Michael. Show #48 was a tribute show I recorded for Michael back in 2009. Happy Songs of Death had two different album covers. One was designed by Nikki O'Shea. I called it "Death's Autoharp". It featured the Grim Reaper playing the autoharp with Nikki's popular comic book art style. The second was designed by Celtic artist Ingrid Houwers. I called that "The Wake" because there's Celtic death theme with merriment. It actually almost has a Celtic/Mexican Day of the Dead feel to it. Really cool. The songs are a mix of traditional Irish and Scottish songs as well as some traditional folk songs and several original songs as well. Subscribe at Celtfather.com if you want to find out more about some of the songs in the future. And if you have any questions, email me.

Episode 35 (ft: Steve Ippolito) Dante Villagomez: Singing Bowls, Autoharp, Bells Steve Ippolito: Singing Bowls, Autoharp, Bells Night at Sea is a weekly late-night podcast aiming to shift the mind towards the land of Nod. Peaceful meditation through ambient improvisational looping. New episode uploaded every Tuesday @ 10:30 P.M. Each episode is recorded live and mixed the week of release by Spices Peculiar Explore the full array of music, videos, and art at spicespeculiar.com

Spiritual Happy Hour is thriled to welcome Stephaine and Cheryl Lynn Spinner from the country music group Spinn on Thursday, November 16th at 8pm Eastern Time.  They're city girls with country hearts and they're putting their cowboy boot imprint on the Garden State and the rest of the country.  We will be talking about the power of music and how it can transform and heal us.  Join us as we listen to to their story/journey and hear some of their music from their new album Freedom. This past year Spinn won country music station NASH FM’s NASH Next regional competition – which featured over 750 bands – earning them a trip to Nashville to perform in the finals, and tour with the other Top 10 finalists from around the country. Brooks & Dunn’s Kix Brooks, who was one of the competition’s judges, was so impressed with the duo that he asked to be part of the Spinn Fan Club (other judges included Big Machine Label Group’s Scott Borchetta, Rascal Flatts’ Jay DeMarcus, and Season 4 winner of The Voice, Danielle Bradbery). A lot of people have been asking to be a part of Spinn's fan club lately, as their spot on the NASH Next tour gave them the opportunity to show all of America what NJ and NYC already knew – a Spinn live show is always a good time. Hitting the stage with their unique mix of traditional country – including Cheryl Lynn playing the Autoharp – playful banter, and a heaping dose of humor, Spinn wins people over with both their music, and their personalities. It’s a combination that has brought country music fans together in many of New York and New Jersey’s top venues, including Rockwood Music Hall, The Stone Pony, and Maxwell’s.

What is the autoharp? Why do I play it? I don't answer those questions but I do share some of my autoharp music with you as I prepare to re-launch Autoharp Radio. Listen. Subscribe. Get free music at pubsong.net. I started to seriously play the autoharp in 1997. I was amazed by its versatility and 5-octaves that one could play on it. That's led a life-long journey of exploration of the instrument. Now, I am primarily a singer. However, I have done my best to offer a new sound to the autoharp community.  The songs I picked for this show are a mix of vocal and instrumental music where the autoharp plays an important part in the individual song or tune. I created it primarily for my AutoharpRadio.com website in conjunction with AutoharpMusic.com where you can find all sorts of great autoharp music tips and suggestions on how you can get started playing the autoharp. If you would like to see some tutorials, please email me.   Pub Talk If you like what you hear, go to my website and buy a CD or some MP3s.  You'll find me in the coming weeks at GenCon and DragonCon.  Plus, I have an internet concert on Sunday, August 13, 2017. On Monday, August 14, 2017, you'll be able to buy a copy of my brand new single "Wherever I May Roam (acoustic solo)". Or get it free when you join the Gunn Runners Club. The Gunn Runners Club is my home on Patreon. Right now, 123 people generously pledge $1 per month or more to support my life as a musician. Patrons get free music, early versions of songs and lyrics, behind-the-scenes podcasts, a stereo version of the Pub Songs Podcast and first look at new videos. You can see all the cool gifts you get for just $1 at http://marcgunn.com/us/.  In addition to all of the amazing goodies I mentioned earlier. You also get a digital copy of my next album. It's for the Browncoats, fans of Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity. It's called "As Long As I'm Flyin'". It'll be out this Fall 2017. And yours as a gift for subscribing. Special thanks to my newest patrons: Mary Kathleen Heidenberg.     Who's Playing the Pub Today 0:15 "Name On My Soul" by Kilted Kings from Name On My Soul 6:52 "Fairy Tale Waltz" by Marc Gunn from Heart's Ease 9:58 "Peggy Gordon" by Marc Gunn from The Bridge 14:16 "Cloghden More" by Kilted Kings from Name On My Soul 17:52 "Paddy McCollough" by Brobdingnagian Bards from Songs of Ireland 21:16 "Tolkien" by Brobdingnagian Bards from Songs of the Muse 25:44 PUB TALK 27:40 "Johnny Jump Up" by Marc Gunn from Happy Songs of Death 31:16 "Return to Lonely Mountain" by Marc Gunn from Heart's Ease 35:40 "Pirates vs. Dragons" by Marc Gunn from Pirates vs Dragons 39:57 "Breaking of the Fellowship" by Brobdingnagian Bards from Memories of Middle Earth 46:34 "Stardust Serenade" by Marc Gunn from Heart's Ease The Pub Songs Podcast was produced by Marc Gunn. If you enjoyed this episode, please support the musicians who support this podcast, buy their CDs, then share the show. Special thanks to all of my patrons in the Gunn Runners Club. Would you like 5 of my MP3s for Free? Plus get regular updates of what's new. Subscribe to the podcast and newsletter at  www.pubsong.net.

Welcome to the first episode of Autoharp Radio. My name is Marc Gunn. And yes, I play autoharp. When I first started playing the autoharp in 1997, there was no easy way to listen to the autoharp online.

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas. In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region. This week, three world renowned autoharp virtuosos, Bryan Bowers, Karen Mueller, and Charles Whitmer perform live at the Ozark Folk Center State Park’s annual “Autoharp Weekend.” Mark Jones offers an archival recording of bluegrass legend Buck White performing the song “More Pretty Girls Than One.” Author, folklorist, and songwriter Charley Sandage presents a portrait of Dr. Bill McNeil, the long time archivist at the Ozark Folk Center, in which Dr. McNeil discusses Ozark folk tales. Bryan Bowers takes the auto harp to places not known to exist. Sounds strange, but it’s true. He possesses a powerful and soulful voice, and is a regular contributor to the Annual Auto Harp Weekend at the Ozark Folk Center State Park. From Washington State, Bowers became very popular with the audience of the comedy radio program The Dr. Demento Show with his 1980 recording of Mike Cross' song "The Scotsman.” In 1993, Bowers was inducted into the Autoharp Hall of Fame whose membership includes Mother Maybelle Carter, Kilby Snow, and Sara Carter. Karen Mueller is one of the top autoharp and mountain dulcimer players performing today. Her exciting and innovative performing style, featuring Appalachian, Celtic and contemporary music, has been applauded by critics and audiences from LA to Boston. Bluegrass Unlimited magazine has said "Karen Mueller's touch, timing and taste make her a true virtuoso. Her talent and clarity...deserve a wide audience.” Charles Whitmer is a music educator and composer, as well as being an autoharp virtuoso. He currently has 612 traditional songs in print arranged for autoharp for which he is known internationally. In 2008 he was inducted into the Autoharp Hall of Fame. He is a current staff member of The Autoharp Quarterly as a sheet music editor and was also a long time staff member for I.A.D. Publications, a former international quarterly magazine for autoharp enthusiasts. In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers an archival recording of bluegrass legend Buck White of “The Whites” performing the song “More Pretty Girls Than One,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives. Author, folklorist, and songwriter Charley Sandage presents an historical portrait of the people, events, and indomitable spirit of Ozark culture that resulted in the creation of the Ozark Folk Center State Park and its enduring legacy of music and craft. This episode focuses on Dr. Bill McNeil, the long time archivist at the Ozark Folk Center. For thirty years, from 1975 until his untimely passing in 2005, Dr. Bill McNeil served as the Ozark Folk Center’s folklorist and all-purpose advisor on all things dealing with traditional Ozark culture. During his tenure at the Folk Center, Bill McNeil guided the establishment of the Ozark Cultural Resource Center, an archival and teaching facility on the Folk Center’s grounds. This installment examines Dr. McNeil’s take on Ozark folk tales.

节目组: Bloom in Ink 墨海繁花 节目名称: Be yourself Never give up开头曲 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra - Symphony No. 6 in F Major (F大调第6号交响曲) 用开头（谢谢大兄弟） 引语 -Hello everyone，welcome to Bloom in ink from VOE Foreign Languages Radio Station , I&`&m Margret Don , -I&`&m Livia. 插曲1 葉加瀬太郎 （はかせ たろう） - 風の向こうに (风的彼方) PART 1： -Today we will bring you a story as before, which called Be yourself Never give up今天我们将同样给大家带来一篇故事，名字叫做保持自我 永不放弃The adolescent girl from Tennessee [ˌtenə&`&si:] is standing on the stage of a drama summer camp in upstate New York. It&`&s a beautiful day. But the girl doesn&`&t feel beautiful. She&`&s not the leggy [ˈlegi], glamorous Hollywood type. In fact, she describes herself as dorky. Since she was six years old, Reese Witherspoon has wanted to be a country singer. And Dolly Parton is her idol. But this flat-chested wisp of a girl is no Dolly Parton. Nevertheless, all of this summer she&`&s been acting, dancing and singing---giving it her best.一名少女由田纳西州来到纽约北部，她站在戏剧夏令营的舞台上，虽然天气是那么好，她的心情却一点也不好。因为她不是那种身材颀长、丰腴美艳的好莱坞式美女，实际上她形容自己是“土里土气，还有点傻”。 从六岁开始，瑞茜•威瑟斯彭就梦想着成为一名乡村歌手，多莉•帕顿是她心中的偶像。但她可一点都不像多莉•帕顿，她胸部扁平，身材纤细。然而，整个夏天她都在尽全力地表演，跳舞和唱歌。发挥长处。如果想在这一行发展，不要走自己不擅长的性感路线。更好地专注于自己的特长，为自己喝彩。Play to your strengths. If you&`&re going to make it in this business, it&`&s not going to be on sexy—that&`&s not who you are. Better focus on what you&`&re good at. Celebrate yourself.Despite three years of lessons, at the end of camp her coaches tell her to forget about singing. They suggest she think about another career. If Reese did have talent, it was hiding under her skinny, mousy frame and her Coke-bottle glasses.发挥长处。如果想在这一行发展，不要走自己不擅长的性感路线。更好地专注于自己的特长，为自己喝彩。她已经上了三年的声乐课程，但夏令营结束时，老师们还是告诉她应该忘掉唱歌这件事儿，另谋出路。如果里斯确实有天分的话，那也是给她纤细的身材和厚如可乐瓶底儿的眼镜遮盖住了。Still, she takes their words to heart. After all, why shouldn&`&t she believe the professionals? But back at home in Nashville [ˈnæʃˌvɪl], her mother — a funny, happy, upbeat person — wouldn&`&t let her mope. Her father, a physician, encouraged her to achieve in school. So she worked hard at everything and was accepted at Stanford University. And at age 19, she got a part in a low-budget movie called Freeway. That led to a substantial role in the movie Pleasantville. But her big break came with Legally Blonde.虽然心有不甘，可她还是听从了建议，毕竟，她有什么理由怀疑专业人士呢？但回到位于纳什维尔的家里，她的妈妈—— 一名风趣、快乐、乐观的儿科护士——可不会让里斯感到丝毫的沮丧。她的爸爸是一名医生，他鼓励女儿在学业上有所成就。于是，她凡事努力，终于被斯坦福大学录取。19岁那年，她出演了一部低成本电影《极速惊魂》。这为她后来在《欢乐谷》中争取到真正重要的角色奠定了基础。而她真正的破冰之作是影片《律政俏佳人》。Well, she decided, "if you can&`&t sing and you aren&`&t glamorous, play to your strengths. If you&`&re going to make it in this business, it&`&s not going to be on sexy — that&`&s not who you are. Better focus on what you&`&ve good at. Celebrate yourself." And then came the offer that took her back to her Nashville roots — playing the wife of tormented [ˈtɔ:mentid] country star Johnny Cash. A singing role.她暗下决心：“既然自己没有歌唱天分，又不是光彩照人，那就尽力演出。要想在这行做下去，就不要在性感上做文章了——自己不是那种类型的。最好在自己擅长 的方面下功夫。要展示自己。”这时，她接到片约，邀她出演约翰尼•卡什——一个饱受折磨的乡村歌手——的妻子，这是个需要演员有唱功的角色，该片约又把她 带回到纳什维尔的家乡。All of a sudden, the old fears were back. She was so nervous on the set, a reporter wrote, she "kept a sick bucket" nearby and admitted she "would go backstage after a singing scene and shake." But she didn&`&t give up on the movie or herself.突然，旧时所有的恐惧感又回来了，一名记者报道说，她在台上实在是太紧张了，甚至在一边“准备了呕吐时要用的痰盂”，她自己也承认“每唱完一幕回到后台，自己都在发抖”。但她没放弃那部电影，也没放弃自己。The humor and drive she learned at home overcame the self-doubt learned on that summer stage. She spent 6 months taking singing lessons again. She learned to play the Autoharp. And the hard work built up her confidence. Last March, Reese Witherspoon walked up on another stage, the Kodak [ˈkəudæk] Theatre in Hollywood, and accepted the Oscar as Best Actress for her heartbreaking, heartwarming singing role as June Carter Cash in Walk the Line.她用六个月的时间重新开始学习声乐。她还学会了演奏竖琴。不懈的努力让她重拾信心。2006年3月，瑞茜•威瑟斯彭走上了另一个舞台——好莱坞的柯达剧院。凭借在影片《一往无前》里饰演的琼•卡特•卡什这一歌唱角色，她获得了奥斯卡最佳女演员奖，她在片中饰演的角色令人心碎，但也让人心暖。Finally, as you read these accounts of Reese Witherspoon, consider the obstacles [&`&ɒbstəklz] she met. The lesson of the story, I suppose, is that instead of making dozen excuses why you cannot realize your dreams, think about this story, just hold on to your dream and never give up.最后，当你读瑞茜•威瑟斯彭的故事时，想想她遇到的挫折。我认为，这个故事告诉我们，与其找借口解释梦想为什么不能实现，不如想想这个故事，坚持你的梦想，永不放弃。插曲 2 久石譲 (Joe Hisaishi) - Summer PART 2： -After hearing the story, let&`&s enjoy a poem and finish our today&`&s program.-听完这篇故事，让我们最后再欣赏一首小诗来结束我们今天的节目。 .Never give up hopeLife doesn&`&t always give us the joys we want.We don&`&t always get our hopes and dreams, and we don&`&t always get our own way.But don&`&t give up hope, because you can make a difference one situation and one person at a time.Look for the beauty around you--in nature, in others, in yourself--and believe in the love of friends, family, and humankind.You can find love in a smile or a helping hand, in a thoughtful gesture or a kind word. It is all around, if you just look for it.Give love, for in giving it you will find the power in life along with the joy, happiness, patience, and understanding.Believe in the goodness of others and remember that anger and depression can be countered by love and hope.Even when you feel as though there isn&`&t a lot you can do to change unhappiness or problems, you can always do a little--and a little at a time eventually makes a big difference.永远别放弃希望生活并非总是如你所愿。希望有时会落空，梦想有时会破灭，我们不能一切随心所愿。但别放弃希望，因为事物并非一成不变；不同时间，不同场合，你会呈现不同的面貌。处处留心你身边的美吧－－自然中的，别人中的，你自己的－－请相信，美来自朋友、家庭乃至全人类的融融爱意。一个微笑，援助之手，关心的举止，友善的话语，无不传达着爱。爱无所不在，如果你有寻找的话。奉献爱心吧，从中你会发现生活的力量，感受生活带来的幸福快乐，学会忍耐和理解。相信人性本善。记住，爱心和希望能化解一切愤怒和沮丧。 结束曲 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra - Symphony No. 6 in F Major (F大调第6号交响曲) 用结尾(好好做大兄弟) -感谢制作任家豪。-Thank you for your listening.-Bye~ 节目监制：曹睿姝 编辑：唐敏嫣播音：唐敏嫣 刘冲 制作：任家豪

Couch hangs with a friend. Bulgarian state choir & Hiko Momoji & Kenji Kawai & Elysia Crampton & Schoenberg & Autoharp trad & Karriem Riggins & Mozrat & more

Today Show: Sound & Music Guest Speaker: LARAAJI   Laraaji.blogspot.com Edward Larry Gordon "Laraaji" pursued his dream of becoming a Musician and humanitarian artist from a very early age in the Coastal town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Learning to play Piano, Violin, and Trombone, along with singing and performing in church and school choirs, bands and orchestras. His high school scholastic talents and enthusiasm for creating new music won him scholarships to study music at Howard University School of Fine Arts in Washington, DC during the mid 1960's. Laraaji moved to New York City to pursue a double career in comedic acting and music. During these several years of mild success in both careers he received a strong inner call to explore alternative spiritual practices including transcendental meditation, mind science, yoga-meditation, trance journeying and contemplative creativity ...... eventually his lifestyle became one of devotional inner practice and creative inspiration. During the mid 70's, following an inner sound vision he set out to create a new musical sound involving a modified 36 string AutoHarp, alternative tunings and innovative music Electronics. Laraaji serves as senior faculty presenter at the prestigious International Healing Sounds Intensive founded by pioneer sound healing musician Jonathan Goldman, held annually in Colorado, for most of its 19 years. His blogspot HTTP://LARAAJI.BLOGSPOT.COM  contains most of the currently available titles and lists many of Laraaji's current and upcoming performances and events. New Series: The 36 Flow of Energy Systems. Sound - Music Meridians Chi Homeoptic Magnets Crystals Healers Naturopathic Acupuncture Yin & Yang Yoga Chiropractic Qi-Gong Reflexology Meditation Living Foods Auras Chinese Medicine Ayurvedic Color Chakras Massage Therapy Reiki Quantum PhysicsRecap commentary of last week show: Living Foods

Let us start with apologies to everyone who got excited about yesterday’s April Fool’s joke. Yes, it was another bad joke brought to you by Brobdingnagian Bards. I don’t know if it was as bad as 2001 or 2002 when we told everyone we were breaking up the band… but it sounds like it was close. So our apologies. We are NOT reuniting, except at DragonCon. That said, we have a bunch of fun Bards news where you can hear some of the legitimate news, some of which was included in yesterday’s podcast. If you enjoy our insanity, then then please buy a CD over on our website at thebards.net and make sure you also subscribe to our mailing list. April Fools Day – When Bards of a Brobdingnagian persuasion see how far they can push fans before being burned in effigy (previous post) A new Brobdingnagian Bards CD is in development! Magical Mystery Lore is on the way! Ms.Inara Gunn shall be joining the family in May The Unicorn Song DragonCon 2015 – Keep your eyes open Andrew’s wrapping up a new CD, set to be ready by DragonCon – described as “Fantasy Renaissance with an Irish Stance” Saying Farewell to Leonard Nimoy Poll – Which part of the various styles of Marc’s Music do you enjoy? Marc’s new CD – Dragons vs. Pirates – just has a few more days left on Kickstarter! Louisiana Renaissance Festival – Booking the Library: A Guide for Entertainers, Musicians, Speakers, and Authors by Jessica Brawner Ethics of Kickstarter use Rosin the Bow  

Join Priscilla McKinney, Momma Bird here at Little Bird Marketing as she talks with Dan Leadbetter about creativity. From Emily Dickinson's poem, "There is no frigate like a book..." she takes inspiration to read and write as one lump event and explores the interconnectivity of multiple creative endeavors. Fighting the Protestant Work Ethic's notion of doodling as lazy, she encourages everyone to dive into their creative side and listen to one's own life for creative threads which can lead to amazing discoveries. Also, if you have an extra autoharp lying around, please send it to her immediately! Original theme music by Chris Stewart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am in Indianapolis once again for GenCon. I added a new Wednesday evening show that went well despite Autoharp and location problems. Now it's time to rock out the rest of the con. Sponsored by Lunarpages http://marcgunn.com/lunarpages 

I'm back after a week off from vacation on the beach with the family. Kenzie's school started back up so I'm also back to a regular work schedule. Today, I'm pleased to share all of the news I missed this past couple weeks. I list my upcoming shows and apologize for a Celtic podcast screwup. Plus, I get to talk about my "new" autoharp It's like the Six Million Dollar Man, faster, stronger, better than before. Learn what I look for in an autoharp. Find out more at http://marcgunn.com/celticgeek039 Today's show is sponsored by Lunarpages. It's intelligent web hosting for intelligent people. I've used it for 10+ years. http://marcgunn.com/lunarpages 

Robert Lopresti reads his story "Snake in the Sweetgrass" from the December 2003 issue of AHMM. Featuring fiddle and autoharp music performed by the author and his wife, Terri Weiner, including one traditional song and another composed by their daughter, Susan Weiner. Read more about the podcast here: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/10/media-blitz.html www.roblopresti.com

Kevin and Kornflake celebrate six months of Flopcasting by wandering from one silly topic to the next... but they keep coming back to Kenny Rogers. Also: Kornflake wins a contest at the Red Arrow Diner, recalls her college radio days, looks for lobsters on Twitter, stockpiles an emergency supply of bacon, and tries to explain "Numberwang" (which is impossible). Meanwhile Kevin meets one of his comedy heroes (it's Chris Elliott, and shut up), and attends a James Bond-themed concert by Niki Luparelli and the Gold Diggers. Then we end the show with some Chickens in the News! Now it's time to prepare for the Flopcast's next six months. Friends, we have a lot more unimportant work to do.

PETER "PUMA" HEDLUND is considered Sweden's leading traditional player of the modern chromatic nyckelharpa, having won the title World Champion twice, in 1992 and 2000. The nyckelharpa is a traditional Swedish instrument that has been played for more than 600 years. Peter just won Sweden's most prestigious folk award, Zorn badge in Gold "for masterpiece, brilliant and tradition consciously key harp playing." MAEVE GILCHRIST is a master of the Celtic harp. She was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, daughter to an Irish mother and Scottish father she grew up immersed in traditional folk music. From thirteen onwards, Maeve was an in demand member on the traditional music scene in Scotland and at seventeen, she received a full scholarships the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She just released her second album 'Song of Delight' that fuses her Scottish roots with the colors and freedoms of jazz. ANDY COHEN will be playing the Dolceola, a small piano-like instrument that was made in 1905. Andy was inspired to follow, study, perform and promote the music of the southeast quadrant after seeing Rev. Gary Davis perform when he was sixteen. He sets are made up of material from before the twenties to about the fifties. DICK BOAK will be performing the traditional autoharp. Dick is bit of a Renaissance man. This Pennsylvania-based artist, writer, woodworker and musicians built and designed geodesic domes in the late 60s and for the past 32 years he has worked at Martin Guitar. He wrote book called 'Martin Guitar Masterpieces' about the formation of Martin's Artist Relations Department and the conception of more than one hundred and forty signature guitar collaborations with the top musical talents of our time. Dick is also a folk musician and will be performing the autoharp on the show.

We have a great tip this month on how to recognize and deal with your cat's flea problems. Notes: Get your copy of Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers and Irish Drinking Songs: The Cat Lover's Companion. Amazing New Cat Toy... Broken Autoharp Strings. There are other cat Podcasts. Check out Illini Pet Podcast, Random Fandom Podcast Release "The Cat's Meow", Cat Whispering. My Cat Hates You. My new vet is Star of Texas Veterinary Hospital. Have you seen Nora, a Cat Playing a Piano. SONG - "A Cat Named Rover". The Cat Lovers Podcast was produced by Tracey Tracy and recorded by Marc Gunn, Kilted Celtic Musician. Read the shownotes at CatMusicBlog.com.

We have a great tip this month on how to recognize and deal with your cat's flea problems. Notes: Get your copy of Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers and Irish Drinking Songs: The Cat Lover's Companion. Amazing New Cat Toy... Broken Autoharp Strings. There are other cat Podcasts. Check out Illini Pet Podcast, Random Fandom Podcast Release "The Cat's Meow", Cat Whispering. My Cat Hates You. My new vet is Star of Texas Veterinary Hospital. Have you seen Nora, a Cat Playing a Piano. SONG - "A Cat Named Rover". The Cat Lovers Podcast was produced by Tracey Tracy and recorded by Marc Gunn, Kilted Celtic Musician. Read the shownotes at CatMusicBlog.com.