Podcast appearances and mentions of Jim Kweskin

#1,068 - Jim Kweskin Jim Kweskin joins The Paul Leslie Hour and performs an unplugged song! Are you here? Or are you just a hologram that came here to watch The Paul Leslie Hour? Either way, it's our great pleasure to present an interview with Jim Kweskin of the legendary Jim Kweskin Jug Band. It's a fascinating interview, but Jim is also going to treat us all to an unplugged song. A prolific recording artist, Jim Kweskin just released his latest album entitled "Doing Things Right" on Jalopy Records. The album features such esteemed artists as Samoa Wilson, Cindy Cashdollar, Annie Linders, Racky Thomas, and Matt Leavenworth. In addition to discussing the new album, Jim Kweskin talks about who he'd most like to play with and his history with Bob Dylan. You'll also be treated to an unplugged acoustic tune. So, what do you say we get this started - it's episode #1,068! Here's Jim! Here's Paul! The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture.

Hola, gente. Hoy toca abrir la Wurli a la novedades en buena parte del programa. En la primera parte atendiendo al nuevo álbum del octogenario Jim Kweskin, maestro del folk y el jazz norteamericano y fundador de una de las mas brillantes Jug Bands de la historia de la música moderna. Y en la parte final jugamos a destapar en cinco breves viñetas cinco álbumes que este año cumplen 50 años. Por aquí sonarán: The Wood Brothers - Witness Jim Kweskin - Four Or Five Times Jim Kweskin - Viper Mad Jim Kweskin - Mardi Grass Mambo Jim Kweskin - Farewell Daddy Blues Marcos Coll, Robe Edwards, Los Reyes del KO - La Paloma Los Deltonos - Andrés Muñiz Kuervos del Sur - Vendaval Larry McCray - Bye Bye Blues Robert Randolph - Big Woman Shawn Pittman - Until The Time Is Right Fred & The Healers - Lonesome Light The Dead Daisies - Boom Boom Angela Hoodoo - Snakes In My Head David Bowie - Stay Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Fooled Again (I Don't Like It) J.J. Cale - You Got Something Eagles - Victim Of Love Rush - Suite 2112 Gracias por escuchar con cariño y dejar tu corazón en el audio, aunque no lo parezca, esta chorradita es importante. Apoya este proyecto desde 1,49€ al mes. Tan solo tienes que pulsar el botón azul que tienes en la cabecera de este canal Y gracias infinitas, ya que tu aportación permite mejorar cada programa. Este programa, como siempre, está dedicado especialmente a nuestros patrocinadores: La Última Frontera Radio, Yago Llopis, Joao Sampaio, RLP, Juan Carlos Acero, Mechimariani, Iñaki Del Olmo, L Ibiricu Traba, Nachoigs, Alfonso Ladrón, Javier Carmona, Ana López, Gustavo, Carmen Neke, Manuel García y Michel. ¡Qué la música os acompañe!

Singer, guitarist, jug-band pioneer and songster Jim Kweskin joins me on the show today. I can't tell you how many times I heard Jim's name before I ever heard his music. To the generation before me, he was a total legend, and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band was very influential to many musicians who grew up in the 60's and 70's. Jim came up in the Boston/Cambridge area and The Jug Band was legendary around those parts and eventually across America. Old blues, jug and string band music was considered old fashioned at that point in time, and Jim spearheaded its return and kicked off a musical revolution that inspried bands like the Lovon' Spoonful and The Grateful Dead (don't forget they started off as a jug band too). With bandmates like Geoff and Maria Muldaur, Bill Keith, Mel Lyman and Fritz Richmond, the Jug Band was signed to a major label, sold thousands of records and toured across the country tirelessly between 1963-1970. They turned countless young musicians on to the music of artists like Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Boy Fuller and the Mississippi Sheiks.Jim has continued making records and performing under his own name and has just put out a rerally cool album called “Never Too Late”, which is mostly duets with some of his friends on vocals like Maria Muldaur, Meredith Axelrod and many more.I won't go too in depth on his bio here because in the interview, he actually had a bio preopared and read it to me, which you'll hear on the show. It's a first “written statement” for the podcast! I think you'll dig that part of the conversation. You can get all the latest info on Jim at jimkweskin.com - Enjoy my conversation with Jim Kweskin!This season is brought to you by our sponsors Larivée Guitars and Fishman AmplificationYou can join our Patreon here to get all episodes ad-free, as well as access to all early episodesThe show's website can be found at www.makersandshakerspodcast.com Get ad-free episodes and access to all early episodes by subscribing to Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Some songs have very deep roots in the Floodisphere. For instance, the late Joe Dobbs loved this song. In fact, we can remember Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen jamming on this one with Joe and his brother Dennis at their Fret ‘n Fiddle music shop in its original Huntington West 14th Street location in the mid-1970s. (The song might even have been in the set list when the four opened for Little Jimmy Dickens' concert at the old Memorial Field House in 1977.)The tune also was the first song that the great Doug Chaffin played with us when we met up with him at a Nancy McClellan New Year's Eve party a quarter of a century ago. And Sam St. Clair still talks about Chuck Romine loving that melody; oh, how Doctor Jazz could tear it up on his tenor banjo.These days Sam and Charlie have introduced the song to a whole new generation of Floodsters. Just listen to Randy Hamilton and Danny Cox and Jack Nuckols rocking on “Somebody Stole My Gal!”About the Song“Somebody Stole My Gal” already was an old-timer by the time it reached Floodlandia.Written in 1918 by San Francisco songwriter Leo Wood, the song was first recorded by Ted Weems and His Orchestra. In 1924, that group's version sold a million copies and spent a full five weeks at No. 1 on the charts in The Roarin' Twenties.Over the decades, the song also has been recorded by so many of our heroes, folks like Bix Beiderbecke (1928), Cab Calloway (1931), Fats Waller (1935), both Count Basie and Benny Goodman (1940), Johnny Ray (1952) and Jim Kweskin (1965).In the MoviesThe song has even gotten its share of screen time, starting in a cartoon of all things in 1931 from Fleischer Studios, the famed creators of Betty Boop and Koko the Clown.Its best known Big Screen moments, though, were in Peter O'Toole's 1982 comedy My Favorite Year, in the Sissy Spacek-Piper Laurie comedy The Grass Harp in 1995 and in the 2004 epic bio-pic The Aviator about Howard Hughes, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.On a Flood AlbumWhen The Flood went into the studio in November 2002, this was one of the song the guys recorded for the album to be released as The 1937 Flood Plays Up a Storm. Just listen to Joe, Chuck and Doug rocking the introduction. (Oh, and how we love hearing Joe's comment midway through Romine's solo: “Sounds like New Orleans!…)Nowadays you can hear that disc — and all the other Flood albums — for free on the Floodango music streaming service. Click here to give the album a spin.More History?Finally, if you'd like more history on the tunes we play, check out Flood Watch's ever-growing Song Stories section.Click here to start your browsing. 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

We chat with American folk legend Jim Kweskin about his latest album Never Too Late: Duets With My Friends, which features a collection of 18 recordings and storied collaborations with some of his favorite female musicians. The new album stands as a testament to the generation and genre-spanning brilliance that has defined Kweskin's illustrious career for the past six decades.

FTB podcast #548 features 2 songs from 4 new albums, featuring John Leventhal, Willi Carlisle, Sister Sadie, Jim Kweskin.  Full playlist: http://ftbpodcasts.com/?p=9368

A hundred years ago, much of America was having a wild and crazy party. Forgot about the labor wars. Forgot about the spread of Jim Crow and the KKK marching in Washington. Forgot about the doors banging shut on immigrants.Don't be a party pooper, jake. The war was over. The plague of the “Spanish Flu” was declining. The stock market was soaring. Oh sure, alcohol was still prohibited, but… shhhhh, wink, wink, nod, nod … we know a place …It was The Roarin' Twenties. Flappers. Raccoon coats. Cars. Radios. Records. Jazz! And Here Comes JackWhat a great time to be a songwriter. Into that happy, boozy blur of an age walked young Jack Yellen. Born to a Jewish family in Raczki, Poland, Jack was 5 when his family bought him to America. Reared in Buffalo, NY, he began writing songs in high school.Later, after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1913, Yellen worked as a reporter for The Buffalo Courier, but he continued writing songs on the side. Before long, it was journalism that was on the side as his music moved front and center.Actually, Jack got a jump on the jazz. Hits came quickly for Jack, who seemed to have a feel for the Twenties even before the Twenties arrived. Collaborating with George L. Cobb on Tin Pan Alley, Yellen wrote a string of “Dixie” songs, such as “Alabama Jubilee” and “Are You from Dixie?” both in 1915. His real royalty gold, though, was struck when he teamed up with Milton Ager. They entered the music publishing business as part owners of the Ager-Yellen-Bornstein Music Co., for which Jack penned some of the signature songs of the era.“Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now),” “Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah,” “Ain't She Sweet?,” “Happy Feet,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” all were Jack Yellen originals.Washington at Valley Forge…And right in middle of that rush of riches came our our all-time favorite of Jack's creation, “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune. (Vo Do De O).” Yellen and Ager wrote it in 1926. The earliest known versions of the song were recorded on Oct. 29, 1926, by Irving Aaronson and the Commanders, and on Feb. 3, 1927, by The Varsity Eight, a pseudonym for The California Ramblers, which included legend-to-be Tommy Dorsey on trombone. The song launched onto the goofy lyrics stage 30 years before its hey day in the 1950s. (I'll see you ‘Vo Do De O' and raise you a ‘Be-bop-a-lula,' a ‘Shama lama ding dong' and a ‘wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom'”)Soon “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune” became a core song for hokum and jug bands around the world. In fact, we learned it from Jim Kweskin's jug rendition in 1963.Our Take on the TuneThe Flood always has a few novelty tunes in its back pocket, either to liven up a show or maybe to just give ourselves a laugh at the weekly rehearsal. And this one is, of course, is how we get all that big grant money, because it's about history. Well, sort of. There is some question of whether George Washington ever played ukulele, but we're pretty sure he knew a red-hot mama or two ….Flood LoreIncidentally, the song also plays a small role in a Flood Lore. Back in October 2014, the band was part of Marshall University's wonderful stage production of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” doing a 30-minute pre-show set at each performance of the play's run in the beautiful Joan C. Edwards Theater. Click the button below for a story that grew out of that fun week of shows: 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

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

I AIN'T GONNA MARRY by Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band with Maria Muldaur(From GARDEN OF JOY, Reprise 1967)I've always adored Maria Muldaur - we did a podcast on her previously - and, as an adolescent I would study her braided image on the cover of “Garden of Joy” with relish. She is mostly remembered for her radio hit “Midnight at the Oasis”, but her time with JIm Kweskin and the Jug Band was an unrivaled carnival of sexy fun, and “I Ain't Gonna Marry” is my favorite cut of all. This rendition swings with sass and bravado - Richard Greene plays the fiddle with sly insinuation, and when Fritz Richmond makes that punctuating “fart” sound at the end of the intro and middle section, I can't help grinning from ear to ear.  The original source of the tune was obscure, and Kweskin was coy about where he found it,  but thankfully, due to the far reach of the internet, I discovered that the original was written and recorded by “The Moanin' Mama” Sara Martin 44 years earlier, in 1923, on the Okeh label, under the title “Blind Man Blues”.  With all due respect to Ms. Martin, in my opinion the original doesn't hold a candle to Maria's interpretation. Garden of Joy was a Reprise release, which provided a major platform for this group, who had made its bones on the smaller Vanguard label, and was positioned here to leap into the big time.  That was certainly true for Maria, who recorded several albums for them after she went solo. But, here, at the summit of the Jug Band's power, she drops this major bombshell with unimpeded charismatic power. 

The Flood's take on this century-old happy, naughty good-time tune of the Roarin' Twenties owes much to the song's re-arousal by the string bands of the 1960s. Our version borrows the great Jim Kweskin jug band's idea of blending the tunes with the Louis Armstrong standard of the same era, “Heebie Jeebies.” And in this track, while everybody brings great solos, we all agree that it's Danny — our newest Floodster — who, as Sam says, “becomes one with Sister Kate.” 

Authorship of “Sister Kate,” one of the first famous songs of the Roarin' Twenties, is a musical mystery.The composer of record is New Orleans bandleader/violinist Armand Piron, who had a publishing partnership with Clarence Williams. However, Piron's credits for the song frequently have been disputed, most famously by trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who always claimed he wrote the tune himself. Armstrong contended he sold the song for an overcoat (which he received) and a few dollars (which he did not).Piron — who copyrighted it in 1919 as “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (though it wasn't published till 1922) — told jazz historian Al Rose that “that's not Louis's tune or mine either. That tune is older than all of us. People always put different words to it. Some of them were too dirty to say in polite company.”For instance, the way Armstrong did the song didn't have anything to do with a sister Kate, but a lot to do with jiggling lady bits.Gotta have 'em before it's too late,They shake like jelly on a plate.Big ‘n' juicy, soft an' round,Sweetes' ones I ever found.“There's only so many places you could do a number like that,” Piron told Rose, “and not in my band.”The Skinny on The ShimmyCommenting on the song's history, bluesman/author Elijah Wald notes, “Though Piron and his band cleaned up the lyric, they kept the sense intact, since the generally accepted derivation of ‘shimmy' fits Armstrong's verse pretty well.”“The etymology isn't solid,” Wald adds, “but most authorities derive it from chemise — ‘shimmy' seems to have been American slang for a lightweight women's blouse as early as the 1840s — and the dance move was to ‘shake your shimmy' by vibrating the relevant area as rapidly as possible.”And Who Is Kate? Uh… Ask LouisSo, in Piron and Williams' telling, the song was associated with a suggestive shimmy dance move, but was there actually a “sister Kate?” And — poof! — just like that, we're back to Louis Armstrong.The trumpeter long claimed that he knew Kate before she ever shimmied. In his book Louis Armstrong, An Extravagant Life, author Laurence Bergreen said that when New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory hired Armstrong for his band, he told the youngster he should work up a number so they could feature him once in a while. Armstrong did and even created a little dance to go with it.The song was “an unashamedly filthy thing,” Bergreen wrote, called “Katie's Head,” reportedly inspired by the 1883 stabbing death of New Orleans madam Kate Townsend. This particular Kate, who ran a high-class house of prostitution on Basin Street, was murdered in a drunken quarrel with her longtime "fancy man" Troisville Sykes. Despite its dark and bloody subject matter, the song was a hit. Bergreen quoted Armstrong as saying that whenever he sang it, “Man, it was like a sporting event. All the guys crowded around, and they like to carry me up on their shoulders.” Armstrong's performance usually was accompanied by his dance, apparently a version of "The Shimmy,” which was just starting to appear around the country."One night, as I did this number,” Armstrong went on, “I saw this cat writing it all down on music paper. He was quick, man! He could write as fast as I could play and sing. When I had finished, he asked me if I'd sell the number to him. He mentioned $25. When you're only making a couple of bucks a night, that's a lot of money. But what really put the deal over was that I had just seen a hard-hitting steel gray overcoat that I really wanted for those cold nights. So I said `Okay' and he handed me some forms to sign and I signed them. He said he'd be back with the cash, but he never did come back."The stranger with the forms and the pen was Armand Piron's partner Clarence Williams, the ambitious music entrepreneur who would soon be leaving New Orleans for Chicago and then on to New York City.First RecordingsThe earliest recordings of the song were little known 1922 sides by The Original Memphis Five on Pathé Actuelle, by Mary Straine and Joseph Smith's Jazz Band on Black Swan Records and by The Virginians on Victor. A better received version was the 1923 release by vocalist Anna Jones with Fats Waller on piano.Arrangements over the years since then ranged from big band jazz to a hokum version by The Alabama Jug Band in 1934, a precursor to jug band revival and string band versions during the 1960s by Dave Van Ronk, Jim Kweskin and The Greenbriar Boys. Our Take on the TuneThe Flood has always been much enamored of those ‘60s string band renditions. Nowadays our version follows Jim Kweskin's idea on his jug band's 1966 Relax Your Mind album to combine “Sister Kate” with another Louis Armstrong standard, “Heebie Jeebies.”On this track, while everybody is on fire, bringing their own hot solos to the mix, we all agree that it is Danny — our newest Floodster — who, as Sam says, “becomes one” with Sister Kate. 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

Almost forgotten Frank Chace was a Chicago-styled clarinet player who sounded like Pee Wee Russell, but was not just an imitator. Here he brings his sound and unique approach to bands including Wild Bill Davison, Eddie Hubble, George Wein, Yank Lawson, Eddie Miller, Dave Remington, Sid Dawson, Don Ewell, Dewey Jackson, Tom Pletcher, Hal Smith, Jimmy Archey, Johnny Frigo, Ted Butterman and Jim Kweskin from 1951-1987. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-clark49/support

Almost 70 years ago this year, a street musician named Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller recorded his new song, “San Francisco Bay Blues,” for the World Song label.Nowadays that particular 1954 recording is a collector's item, but the world really didn't start knowing this rocking number until 1962 when Fuller recorded a one-man band rendition, which appeared on a Smithsonian Folkways compilation called “Friends of Old Time Music.” After that… well, everybody seemed to know it.Folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott was perhaps the first to embrace it and perform it around the clubs and the studios. With that, it entered the canon of many a trouper, from Tom Rush to Richie Havens to Peter, Paul and Mary.Since then, the song has had an extraordinary number of covers, by Bob Dylan and Jim Kweskin, by Jim Croce and The Weavers, by Hot Tuna and Janis Joplin.Even The Beatles, minus George Harrison, performed a version of ‘San Francisco Bay Blues' during the Get Back/Let it Be sessions on Jan. 14, 1969. And John Lennon recorded an unreleased version of the song during the Imagine sessions in May 1971, while McCartney performed ‘San Francisco Bay Blues' often during his solo concerts in San Francisco. It was played more frequently still at his soundchecks around the world.Eric Clapton performed the song on MTV Unplugged in 1992 during the taping in England. The live album earned six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year.Lone Cat's BackstoryIn the decades before “San Francisco Bay Blues” made its mark, Jesse Fuller rambled along quite a winding path. Born Jonesboro, Ga., in 1896, he grew up with foster parents and did numerous jobs: grazing cows for 10 cents a day; toiling in a barrel factory, a broom factory and a rock quarry; working on a railroad and for a streetcar company; shining shoes; even peddling hand-carved wooden snakes at one point.As a young man, the 1920s found him living in southern California, where he operated a hot-dog stand. It was in those heady Roarin' Twenties days that he was befriended by silent film legend Douglas Fairbanks, who helped him work briefly as an extra in The Thief of Bagland (1924) and East of Suez (1925).Come the Depression, Fuller moved north to Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, where he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad as a fireman, spike driver and maintenance-of-way worker. Around the early 1950s, Fuller began making a living as a street musician, working solo as “The Lone Cat” and busking for money. Starting locally, in clubs and bars in San Francisco and across the bay in Oakland and Berkeley, Fuller became more widely known when he performed on television in both the Bay Area and in Los Angeles.And then came That Song.Our Take on the TuneHonestly, we don't remember when we started doing this one. Twenty years ago, “San Francisco Bay Blues” was the rollicking final track on our first album, but it was already an old number with us.And lately it's back in the repertoire with lively solos by the whole crew. 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 the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion, state politicians move swiftly to secure reproductive healthcare legislation for those traveling to the state. Details on tonight's California Report. We'll hear from California News Service about a troubling error on the 2020 census. Felton Pruitt speaks to folk, jazz, and blues musician Jim Kweskin to round out our newscast.

Felton Pruitt speaks to folk, jazz, and blues musician, Jim Kweskin. Kweskin and Meredith Axelrod will perform at the Oddfellows Hall in downtown Nevada City next Saturday May 14.

 The Flood learned its version of this tune from the great Jim Kweskin's jug band and its 1966 album for Vanguard called “Relax Your Mind.” At last night's Flood rehearsal, we were doing just that, thank you very much. Here we've got Randy Hamilton killing in on the harmonies and double dips of scintillating solos by Sam St. Clair and Danny Cox. As Jim Kweskin says, “I got mine — hope you got yours!”

 One of our heroes — the great jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke — died 90 years ago this summer. His was a short but brilliant time on the planet; he was just 28 when he died, but even before he was gone, he was already a legend, and still today, his music is loved and imitated by players around the world. Some tunes we play always have us thinking of Bix, especially this one, which The Flood started fooling around with, gee, probably 40 years at those crazy, smoky music parties of the 1970s where the band was born. The song was a decade old when Bix and his buddies recorded it in 1928.  A Leo Wood composition, it had already been a million-selling for Ted Weems and his Orchestra in 1924. It would go on the be recorded by everyone from Cab Calloway and Fats Waller to Count Basie and Benny Goodman. Jim Kweskin even made a cool jug band version in the ‘60s.

This exhibit is called The Vietnam War: The Music. Our mission at the Music Museum is to support all Vietnam Veterans and those who serve the United States, then and now. We thank you for your service. ----- Many of the songs in this episode will have a special meaning for you. A place, a brother, a time gone by. This program is for you, the Vietnam Vets, who will never forget. ----- In this episode you'll hear the song, “BATTLE HYMN OF THE RIVER RATS” Dick Jonas wrote this song while flying to the first "practice" stateside reunion of the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots' Association ("Red River Rats") in 1969. The Red River Rats are pilots who flew combat missions across the Red River in North Vietnam. They held "practice" reunions in Thailand and the United States until the POW's came home in 1973, when the first real reunion was held. Other units have adapted this song for themselves, notably the Ravens, who flew forward air control in the secret war in Laos. ------- Visit: http://www.fighterpilotuniversity.com/ ------ ----- DICK JONAS (guitar) Dick Jonas, the best-known song writer of the air war, flew 125 missions with the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron ("Satan's Angels"), 8th Tactical Fighter Wing ("Wolfpack"), Ubon Rachitani Royal Thai Air Force Base, 1967-1968. He participated in Rolling Thunder (the code name for U.S. air operations over North Vietnam at that time), took part in Steel Tiger missions, and flew in support of Khe Sahn. ----- Our goal with The Vietnam War: The Music is to honor the fallen and the survivors with the music that got them through “just one more day”. Our shows are broadcast around the world. They say thank you & “welcome home” to all Vietnam Vets. There is no opinion offered on the War. It's all about the music.---- For your service and your sacrifice, this is The Vietnam War: The Music. - ----- This episode: Vietnam War: The Music – The Order Is Rapidly FadingDon't forget to join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712   - - - - - or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com   - - - - -In this episode you'll hear:1)     The Times They Are A Changin' by Simon & Garfunkel2)     Song Of The Patriot by Johnny Cash & Marty Robbins3)     We Take Care Of Our Own by Bruce Springsteen4)     Soldiers & Jesus by James Otto5)     Welcome Home by Country Joe McDonald6)     Love Minus Zero/No Limit by Buck Owens7)     She Has Funny Cars by Jefferson Airplane8)     Whipping Post by The Allman Brothers Band9)     Battle Hymn of the Red River Rats by Dick Jonas10) Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones11) War Song by Vinnie James12) Black And White by Three Dog Night13) East Bound and Down by Dave Dudley14) Cry Baby by Janis Joplin15) Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer16) Some Gave All by Billy Ray Cyrus17) My Generation by The Who18) Rag Mama by Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band19) John Brown by State Radio20) Tell All The People by The Doors21) Didn't I by Montgomery Gentry22) Slippin' Into Darkness by War23) Get Back by The Beatles24) The King Is Gone (So Are You) by George Jones25) Universal Soldier by Glen Campbell26) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right by Waylon Jennings27) Someday Never Comes by Creedence Clearwater Revival28) I Am A Rock by Simon & Garfunkel29) Once I Was by Judy Collins30) These Are My People by Johnny Cash31) It Ain't Me Babe by Peter, Paul And Mary32) The Green Fields of France by Dropkick Murphys33) Flowers of the Forest [aka "The Lament"] by Mike Oldfield

Jim Kweskin has been an iconic figure on the music scene for decades! He grew up listening to the music of his time, Swing and Jazz and Folk, and went on to found the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Kweskin has … More ... The post Jim Kweskin & Samoa Wilson – New Album “I Just Want To Be Horizontal” and a Surprise from Abi Rooley-Towle! appeared first on Paradigms Podcast.

Welcome to a new edition of the Neon Jazz interview series with Jazz Musician Samoa Wilson  .. We caught up with her in May 2020 about what is going on in this new COVID-19 world of ours .. Since she was 12 years old, she has been captivating audiences with a voice the New York Times calls “sweet, effortless, old-timey”. Raised in the riverbed of traditional North American folk music, she came up in the Boston scene, under the wing of jug band and folk legend Jim Kweskin. Enjoy … Click here to listen.Neon Jazz is a radio program airing since 2011. Hosted by Joe Dimino and Engineered by John Christopher in Kansas City, Missouri giving listeners a journey into one of America's finest inventions. Take a listen on KCXL (102.9 FM / 1140 AM) out of Liberty, MO. Listen to KCXL on Tunein Radio at http://tunein.com/radio/Neon-Jazz-With-Joe-Dimino-p381685/. You can now catch Neon Jazz on KOJH 104.7 FM out of the Mutual Musicians Foundation from Noon - 1 p.m. CST Monday-Friday at https://www.kojhfm.org/. Check us out at All About Jazz @ https://kansascity.jazznearyou.com/neon-jazz.php. For all things Neon Jazz, visit http://theneonjazz.blogspot.com/

Do you know what SRP stands for, it's an acronym for a very sterile system of learning that leads to followers, copy cating, no individuality.....in music SRP stands for Standard Recording Procedure. The way of confining musicians to make music they don't want to create. The ties that bind, the money the 3 record companies remaining in this land.....a squeamish representation of dosing Billy Eckstine with punch on the way down to Vanguard Studios. My guest today is an authentic musician who is comfortable enough to be himself. This carries through the music, which because of the acoustic setup allows my guest's voice to become an instrument....there is no amplification! The output is done by the people themselves - whatever they had to give in front of five people in a barn with a combined total of 3 teeth or in a coffee house in Cambridge, MA which is across the Charles River from Boston University where myself and my guest both went. My guest is unconventional, a jug band junkie when crossed with legal LSD made for a real groovy time. Fellow comrades Geoff Muldaur, who smoked his first joint at Sabino Canyon, Fritz Richmond, Bill Keith, Maria Muldaur and Blind Lemon Jefferson all providing peer and mentor support in an experiential way.....they weren't getting an education in the classroom. This resurgence of regional American roots music was spurred on by independant record labels who saw transracial music as a good thing. This adherence to the acoustic itty by certain labels allowed this music to be heard by DJs who would mix in some Berry Gordy MoTown, Ray Charles from La La land and Tito Puente from the palladium. Their education was faith based with a common understanding that helping others was good, communicating non-verbally is all encompassing and mind expansion is necessary for new art to come into existence. But make no mistake, it has to be authentic, the artist must have creative control and if those back in the game saw any fleeting hash tag of commerciality they ran from it like a wild horse with a relaxed mind. Just back from NYC fresh off some gigs, Jim Kweskin welcome to the JFS. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support

The trend setter, the one who is most authentic. Trying to play from her guts and her soul the way her mentors did. She was part of the sterile universe of the fifties growing up watching bands with striped shirts and acts. Not real people channeling themselves but an act. She pushed back against the act by creating change. She went to Appalachia to find Doc Watson, going to Find That Tennessee Mountain Home with Jim Keltner. This woman was not from the south but her mentors were Like the Reverend Gary David and Mississippi John Hurt were and because they were so authentic in their musical presentation that it rubbed off on my guest. To seek and discover for yourself has always been my guests motto. Don't listen to critics or admirers. Dust off those rusty tunes that haven't been played for 40 years and play them with everything you got. My guest has played many songs over the last 40 years but their as authentic and fresh because she seeks new beauty within and outside. Plant a seed, watch it grow, if it's not perfect or you flub a note that okay because it's the gateway to further creation. My guest has sustained because she has continually adapted to the changing terrain of what was once was a record industry, she maintains relationships with musicians she may not have worked with in many years along with opening doors to younger generations of artists who get to learn from a trendsetter. My show is and has been dedicated to bassist John Kahn. I never knew John or got to see him play but I have done my best to connect with those who did and today I get to communicate with someone who knew him more than most. Someone who recognized his genius and enjoyed spending time with him on and off the bandstand. That is special and what's also special is that I have come full circle with another iconic band. I interviewed All the Crusaders, I interviewed Dizzy band from the seventies, I interviewed all of the Jerry Hahn brotherhood and now with my guest Today I have connected with every jug bandmate from Jim Kweskin's group. That's special and what's also special is that out of my 400 guests I can count on my hands the number of woman I have interviewed. I need their input to shift the weight of perspective, to demystify the past and promote the present, to continually produce original songs and share the gifts that she received from her mentors. Time to send your camel to bed, Maria Muldaur welcome to the JFS --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support

This exhibit is called The Vietnam War: The Music. Our mission at the Music Museum is to support all Vietnam Veterans and those who serve the United States, then and now. We thank you for your service. ----- Many of the songs in this episode will have a special meaning for you. A place, a brother, a time gone by. This program is for you, the Vietnam Vets, who will never forget. ----- In this episode you’ll hear the song, “BATTLE HYMN OF THE RIVER RATS” Dick Jonas wrote this song while flying to the first "practice" stateside reunion of the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots' Association ("Red River Rats") in 1969. The Red River Rats are pilots who flew combat missions across the Red River in North Vietnam. They held "practice" reunions in Thailand and the United States until the POW's came home in 1973, when the first real reunion was held. Other units have adapted this song for themselves, notably the Ravens, who flew forward air control in the secret war in Laos. ------- Visit: http://www.fighterpilotuniversity.com/ ------ ----- DICK JONAS (guitar) Dick Jonas, the best-known song writer of the air war, flew 125 missions with the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron ("Satan's Angels"), 8th Tactical Fighter Wing ("Wolfpack"), Ubon Rachitani Royal Thai Air Force Base, 1967-1968. He participated in Rolling Thunder (the code name for U.S. air operations over North Vietnam at that time), took part in Steel Tiger missions, and flew in support of Khe Sahn. ----- Our goal with The Vietnam War: The Music is to honor the fallen and the survivors with the music that got them through “just one more day”. Our shows are broadcast around the world. They say thank you & “welcome home” to all Vietnam Vets. There is no opinion offered on the War. It’s all about the music. - ---- For your service and your sacrifice, this is The Vietnam War: The Music. - ----- This episode: Vietnam War: The Music - S. 2 / E. 7 – The Order Is Rapidly Fading Don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 - - - - - or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com - - - - - In this episode you’ll hear: 1) The Times They Are A Changin' by Simon & Garfunkel 2) Song Of The Patriot by Johnny Cash & Marty Robbins 3) We Take Care Of Our Own by Bruce Springsteen 4) Soldiers & Jesus by James Otto 5) Welcome Home by Country Joe McDonald 6) Love Minus Zero/No Limit by Buck Owens 7) She Has Funny Cars by Jefferson Airplane 8) Whipping Post by The Allman Brothers Band 9) Battle Hymn of the Red River Rats by Dick Jonas 10) Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones 11) War Song by Vinnie James 12) Black And White by Three Dog Night 13) East Bound and Down by Dave Dudley 14) Cry Baby by Janis Joplin 15) Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer 16) Some Gave All by Billy Ray Cyrus 17) My Generation by The Who 18) Rag Mama by Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band 19) John Brown by State Radio 20) Tell All The People by The Doors 21) Didn't I by Montgomery Gentry 22) Slippin' Into Darkness by War 23) Get Back by The Beatles 24) The King Is Gone (So Are You) by George Jones 25) Universal Soldier by Glen Campbell 26) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right by Waylon Jennings 27) Someday Never Comes by Creedence Clearwater Revival 28) I Am A Rock by Simon & Garfunkel 29) Once I Was by Judy Collins 30) These Are My People by Johnny Cash 31) It Ain't Me Babe by Peter, Paul And Mary 32) The Green Fields of France by Dropkick Murphys 33) Flowers of the Forest [aka "The Lament"] by Mike Oldfield

“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.”― Kahlil Gibran In this episode Anais chats with newly transplanted roots singer Mara Kaye. She and her partner, guitarist, Tim McNalley share musical memories and tunes from the soul. "MARA KAYE IS THAT RARE CROSS-SPECIES PHENOMENON, A BLUES AMPHIBIAN. WHEN OTHERS ‘SING THE BLUES’ AS IF OFFERING AN UNUSUAL SMALL PLATE AT THE TAPAS BAR, MARA HAS SO IMMERSED HERSELF IN THE IDIOM THAT SHE GOES DOWN TO THE BOTTOM AND DOESN’T NEED AIR UNTIL THE SHOW IS OVER.  SHE’S A MODERNIST RATHER THAN A MUSEUM PIECE: HER CREATIONS CAN BE DARKLY MOURNFUL, SAVAGELY VENGEFUL, OR GLEEFULLY EROTIC, BUT THEY ARE ALWAYS LEAVENED WITH BROOKLYN SPICE"  https://www.marakaye.com/ Tim McNalley is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and songwriter from Southern California. While most commonly seen on the upright and electric bass, he also performs, records and tours on guitar, cello, mandolin and sitar- a breadth that has allowed him the opportunity to collaborate with artists such as Ariana Grande, Lianne La Havas, Changuito, Steve Grand, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Lianne La Havas, lostboycrow, Juanita Stein, Aashish Khan, Earl Thomas, Jim Kweskin, Burt Turetzky, and more.   In film, McNalley co-wrote, produced, and performed on soundtracks for Sex, Drugs, and Bicycles (2019), Influent (2017) and Zula the Infinite (2016)   McNalley graduated Summa Cum Laude from UC San Diego with a BA in Music and an emphasis in Jazz and the African Diaspora. McNalley has also had the blessing of studying with several notable musicians, including Hindustani music with virtuoso Kartik Seshadri, upright bass with Mark Dresser, as well as composition with Anthony Davis and Grammy winning producer Kamau Kenyatta FOLLOW Mara & Tim Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mara.kaye.9 ttps://www.facebook.com/tim.mcnalley.5 Instagram @marakaye @timmcnalley   JOIN Mara & Tim for their weekly livestream concert, “Sauce & Snack Saturday Special” Every Saturday @ 6pm THANK YOU to our Sponsor Lehmans Live simply with the Lehman's hardware online store stock up on non-electric tools & homesteading supplies since 1955. Would your company like a sponsorship spot? Contact us at info@urbanhomestead.org

Jug bands got their name from using instruments that were either homemade or household items such as a jug. Beginnings in the South in the 19th century, with origins in Louisville, KY, they were made up predominately of African-American musicians and were in their heyday from the 1890s to the Great Depression. Playing a mixture of blues, ragtime, and jazz, jug bands were some of the first musicians to record and a key contributor to the evolution of blues and early rock and roll. The folk revival in the 60's launched a second wave of jug-band music and it continues to exist and evolve today. On this WoodSongs broadcast, we'll be celebrating the music and history of jug bands with musicians from across the country. JIM KWESKIN is a folk music legend and founder of the legendary 1960s Jim Kweskin Jug Band which successfully transformed the sounds of pre-World War II rural music into a springboard for their good-humored performances. Their imitators were legion, including The Grateful Dead, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Lovin’ Spoonful and more. These days Jim is best known as a singer and bandleader, but he also created one of the bedrock guitar styles of the folk revival. JERRON “BLIND BOY” PAXTON transforms traditional jazz, blues, folk, and country into the here and now. Hailing from NYC, his sound is influenced by the likes of Fats Waller and "Blind" Lemon Jefferson. According to The Wall Street Journal, Paxton is "virtually the only music-maker of his generation—playing guitar, banjo, piano and violin, among other implements—to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and ‘30s." THE STEEL CITY JUG SLAMMERS made a name for themselves in Birmingham, AL with a new album, extensive touring and the band's recent induction into the Jug Band Hall of Fame. WoodSongs Kids: The Wallace Sisters are three harmozing siblings from Lexington, Kentucky.

Kim Moberg was born in Juneau, Alaska, the daughter ofa classical pianist mother of Alaskan Native Tlingit descentand a US Coast Guard veteran father from Kansas.Music was the constant in Kim's childhood, helping her toadjust to the frequent movesassociated with growing up in a military family. At the age of 14, Kim began playing acoustic guitaron a borrowed nylon 6 string. A few years later,Kim taught herself to strum and finger pickto her favorite songs by singer/songwriters of the 1970's, but debilitating stage fright kept her from pursuingher own dream of becoming a professional performer.In 2014, after a hiatus from music to raise her two daughterswith her husband, Kim set out to overcome herstage fright and wrote her first song. Kim's debut CD entitled "Above Ground”, celebrates the achievement of her goal to bring her music out of the basement. “Above Ground”, produced by Grammy nominated producer Jon Evans, was released worldwide in September 2017. Kim teamed again with Jon Evans to record her sophmore albumn “Up Around The Bend” consisting of 13 new original songs and one cover, Cliff Eberhardt's “The Long Road”.Kim's passionate and heartfelt vocals mesmerize listeners while her compositions tug at feelings ofmelancholy, heartbreak, healing and social consciousness.RECENT RECOGNITIONS* 2020 Folk Alliance International Scholarship Grantee*Finalist Blues & Roots Radio Song Contest 2019* Above Ground #23 Folk Alliance International Folk DJ Charts 2 songs in the Top 20 Category July and August 2018 * Winner: 2018 Rose Garden Coffee House Performing Songwriter Competition* 2nd Place: Linden Tree Coffeehouse Winter Potpourri American Idol Folk* 2017 Northeast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA) Suzi Wollenberg DJ Showcase performing artistKim's performance resume includes sharing the stage as opener and/or co-bill with numerous contemporary and established artists including: Jim Kweskin, Bill Staines, Kirsten Maxwell, Ellis Paul,, Joe Jencks, Vance Gilbert, Catie Curtis, Cheryl Wheeler, Alice Howe, Liz Longley, Grace Morrison and Rod Abernethy.

Jug bands got their name from using instruments that were either homemade or household items such as a jug. Beginnings in the South in the 19th century, with origins in Louisville, KY, they were made up predominately of African-American musicians and were in their heyday from the 1890s to the Great Depression. Playing a mixture of blues, ragtime, and jazz, jug bands were some of the first musicians to record and a key contributor to the evolution of blues and early rock and roll. The folk revival in the 60's launched a second wave of jug-band music and it continues to exist and evolve today. On this WoodSongs broadcast, we'll be celebrating the music and history of jug bands with musicians from across the country. JIM KWESKIN is a folk music legend and founder of the legendary 1960s Jim Kweskin Jug Band which successfully transformed the sounds of pre-World War II rural music into a springboard for their good-humored performances. Their imitators were legion, including The Grateful Dead, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Lovin' Spoonful and more. These days Jim is best known as a singer and bandleader, but he also created one of the bedrock guitar styles of the folk revival. JERRON “BLIND BOY” PAXTON transforms traditional jazz, blues, folk, and country into the here and now. Hailing from NYC, his sound is influenced by the likes of Fats Waller and "Blind" Lemon Jefferson. According to The Wall Street Journal, Paxton is "virtually the only music-maker of his generation—playing guitar, banjo, piano and violin, among other implements—to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and ‘30s." THE STEEL CITY JUG SLAMMERS made a name for themselves in Birmingham, AL with a new album, extensive touring and the band's recent induction into the Jug Band Hall of Fame. WoodSongs Kids: The Wallace Sisters are three harmozing siblings from Lexington, Kentucky.

Betsy Siggins is a folk boss in charge, and we’re beyond honored to welcome her as a guest on Basic Folk. Siggins has been an integral part of the folk music world since the late 1950’s when she and her roommate, Joan Baez, starting hanging around the Cambridge scene at Club 47. She’s work at the famous folk club until it closed in the 1960’s, where after that she worked with The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and also paved the way for homeless shelters catering to AIDs patients in New York City. After her tenure as Executive Director at Club Passim (formerly Club 47), Betsy worked on The New England Folk Archives that reside in Amherst, MA. Currently, Betsy is working on her memoirs that are bound to be packed with priceless stories about folk legends like Baez, Bob Dylan, Jim Kweskin, James Taylor and many more. We hear some of these fascinating stories from Siggins during the conversation. We also get a glimpse into where Betsy came from in her roots with her family life, that did include some classical music influence as well as a love for early country radio. I honestly could have talked to her for days. Hope you enjoy! This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

In honour of their upcoming show in Bellingham, we feature the great old-time and cajun fiddler Suzy Thompson and the incomparable Jim Kweskin. We also celebrate some birthdays as usual and feature some great new music. Enjoy!

Jim Kweskin is the founder of the legendary 1960s Jim Kweskin Jug Band with Fritz Richmond, Geoff Muldaur, Maria Muldaur, Mel Lyman and Bruno Wolfehttps://www.jimkweskin.com

Jim Kweskin is maybe the most famous person you might not know. With The Jim Kweskin Jug band, he mixed together folk and jazz which invigorated the straight-laced Cambridge folk scene in the 1960's. A regular at The Club 47, now Club Passim, Kweskin talks about how he came to the jug band style and how his band's relaxed stage presence changed the dynamic of the live folk show in profound ways.

HIROYA TSUKAMOTO is a one-of-a-kind composer, guitarist and singer-songwriter from Kyoto, Japan. He began playing the five-string banjo when he was thirteen, and took up the guitar shortly after. In 2000, Hiroya received a scholarship to Berklee College of Music and came to the United States. Hiroya has been leading concerts internationally including several appearances at Blue Note in New York City with his group and Japanese National Television(NHK). Hiroya performed, recorded and shared stage with Esperanza Spalding, The Kennedys, Joe Jencks(Brother Sun), Michael League (Snarky Puppy), Brooks Williams and Jim Kweskin. He’s released two solo albums and three with his acclaimed group Interoceanico. YOUSSRA EL HAWARY became a slyly defiant sensation in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution capturing the stories of Cairo, and the charged alchemy of the Mediterranean basin that fuels her distinctive and soulful sound. Now a fixture of Egypt’s independent music scene, El Hawary and her five-piece band meld the sounds of Cairo’s underground with quirky acoustic charm, led by the sway and swagger of El Hawary’s accordion. Her songs entwine French chanson, indie rock, and jazz to underscore an idiosyncratic artistic world. She is currently on her debut US tour as part of Center Stage, a cultural exchange program that invites performing artists from abroad to the United States to perform, meet, and share their experiences with communities around the country. WoodSongs Kid: Eddy Wan is a sixteen-year-old cello player from Lexington, Kentucky.

Ryan H. Walsh is the author of Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, an adventurous book chronicling the development of Van Morrison’s 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks in Boston and many other interrelated Boston stories from the same year. Ryan joins Free Association to talk about some of the stories from 1968, including The Velvet Underground’s popularity in Boston, the so-called Boston Sound bands, and Jim Kweskin and Mel Lyman of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Van Morrison, “Sweet Thing”Astral Weeks (Rhino/Warner Bros. 1968 Rock) Jim Kweskin, “Stealin’”America (Collectible Records 1971) The Velvet Underground “White Light/White Heat”White Light/White Heat (Verve 1968) The Velvet Underground “Sister Ray (Live)”Live at the Boston Tea Party, May 1969 (ODL 2014) The Velvet Underground “Femme Fatale”Sunday Morning/Femme Fatale (Verve 1966) The Modern Lovers “Astral Plane”The Modern Lovers (Beserkley 1976) Earth Opera “The Red Sox are Winning”Earth Opera (Elektra 1968) Beacon Street Union “Mystic Morning”The Eyes of The Beacon Street Union (MGM 1968) Van Morrison “Astral Weeks”Astral Weeks (Rhino/Warner Bros. 1968 Rock) Hallelujah the Hills “Theme From Astral Weeks 1968”Against Electricity (Discrete Pageantry Records 2018)

Ryan H. Walsh is the author of Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, an adventurous book chronicling the development of Van Morrison's 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks in Boston and many other interrelated Boston stories from the same year. Ryan joins Free Association to talk about some of the stories from 1968, including The Velvet Underground's popularity in Boston, the so-called Boston Sound bands, and Jim Kweskin and Mel Lyman of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Van Morrison, “Sweet Thing”Astral Weeks (Rhino/Warner Bros. 1968 Rock) Jim Kweskin, “Stealin'”America (Collectible Records 1971) The Velvet Underground “White Light/White Heat”White Light/White Heat (Verve 1968) The Velvet Underground “Sister Ray (Live)”Live at the Boston Tea Party, May 1969 (ODL 2014) The Velvet Underground “Femme Fatale”Sunday Morning/Femme Fatale (Verve 1966) The Modern Lovers “Astral Plane”The Modern Lovers (Beserkley 1976) Earth Opera “The Red Sox are Winning”Earth Opera (Elektra 1968) Beacon Street Union “Mystic Morning”The Eyes of The Beacon Street Union (MGM 1968) Van Morrison “Astral Weeks”Astral Weeks (Rhino/Warner Bros. 1968 Rock) Hallelujah the Hills “Theme From Astral Weeks 1968”Against Electricity (Discrete Pageantry Records 2018)

HIROYA TSUKAMOTO is a one-of-a-kind composer, guitarist and singer-songwriter from Kyoto, Japan. He began playing the five-string banjo when he was thirteen, and took up the guitar shortly after. In 2000, Hiroya received a scholarship to Berklee College of Music and came to the United States. Hiroya has been leading concerts internationally including several appearances at Blue Note in New York City with his group and Japanese National Television(NHK). Hiroya performed, recorded and shared stage with Esperanza Spalding, The Kennedys, Joe Jencks(Brother Sun), Michael League (Snarky Puppy), Brooks Williams and Jim Kweskin. He's released two solo albums and three with his acclaimed group Interoceanico. YOUSSRA EL HAWARY became a slyly defiant sensation in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution capturing the stories of Cairo, and the charged alchemy of the Mediterranean basin that fuels her distinctive and soulful sound. Now a fixture of Egypt's independent music scene, El Hawary and her five-piece band meld the sounds of Cairo's underground with quirky acoustic charm, led by the sway and swagger of El Hawary's accordion. Her songs entwine French chanson, indie rock, and jazz to underscore an idiosyncratic artistic world. She is currently on her debut US tour as part of Center Stage, a cultural exchange program that invites performing artists from abroad to the United States to perform, meet, and share their experiences with communities around the country. WoodSongs Kid: Eddy Wan is a sixteen-year-old cello player from Lexington, Kentucky..

PODCAST: 24 Dec 2017     01 Shake 'Em Up Charlie - Mighty Mo Rodgers & Baba Sissoko - Griot Blues 02 The Ballad Of Norwich Gaol - Various - The Transports 2017 03 Castle Kellys - Damien O’Kane - Avenging & Bright 04 Wildflowers - The Wailin' Jennys - Fifteen 05 The Manchester Angel - Laura Smith & Ted Kemp - The Poacher's Fate 06 Lark In The Clear Air - Karine Polwart & Pippa Murphy - A Pocket Of Wind Resistance 07 Twenty-One Years On Dartmoor - Nick Hart - Nick Hart Sings Eight English Folk Songs 08 Take The Buckles - India Electric Company - Seven Sister 09 Mudcrab Blues - Mandolin Jack - Phoenix in the Ashes 10 Delilah And Samson (Featuring Luke Jackson) - Kirsty Merryn - She & I 11 Scarecrow - Bob Fox - A Garland For Joey 12 What Will We Do When We Have No Money? - Lankum - Between The Earth And Sky 13 Now She's Gone - Jim Kweskin - Unjugged 14 Water Is Life - Luka Bloom - Refuge 15 The Final Trawl - Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh - Foxglove & Fuschia 16 All Among The Barley - Damien O’Kane - Avenging & Bright 17 Collateral Damage - Jim Page - A Hand Full Of Songs 18 White Old Woman Of The Night - Karine Polwart & Pippa Murphy - A Pocket Of Wind Resistance 19 Sphagnum Mass For A Dead Queen - Karine Polwart & Pippa Murphy - A Pocket Of Wind Resistance 20 Shove The Pigs Foot A Little Further In The Fire - Brendan Power and Jane Rothfield - Pufnsaw 21 Vasilisia - Daria Kulesh - Vasilisa - EP 22 Songs About A Train -  Reg Meuross - Songs About A Train 23 Johnny Has Gone For  Soldier - Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh - Foxglove & Fuschia 24 Weihnachten 1914 - Kerstin Blodig & Ian Melrose - Schneetreiben

Today on the show is Bill Keith. Such a banjo player, this guy was. He played with Bill Monroe, Bob Dylan, Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, Judy Collins, and about a million other people. He’s helping Steve do one of his favorite songs “Bully Of The Town”. It’s sad, Bill passed away but Steve is honored that he got to play with him. Plus, Harry's been visiting a juice bar and then a salad bar. You want puns? This is the home office for them, and Steve and Harry do an Untrue Facts segment .Steve sings a song he wrote, "The Biggest Sandwich I Ever Ate."

Jim Kweskin plays old-time music the way it was played back in the twenties, thirties and forties, though he is quick to point out that his band was not and is not a "revival" or nostalgia act. Today, we talk with Jim about, among other things, how he got his first musical instrument, his first record contract, his musical mission, and the intentional community of which he is still a member.

Mess o' Music © 2009 by Spider Robinson Music: George Harrison, Leslie Alexander, Jane Siberry, Amos Garrett, Geoff Muldaur, Jim Kweskin, Danielle Miraglia, Cliff Eberhardt, Lou Killen, Stacey Earle, Mark Stuart, Joyce Moreno.