Year: 2008

Interview with Alaska’s Fiddling Poet – Ken Waldman

1 Comment

Ken Waldman - Alaska's Fiddling Poet

On this week’s show I talk with Ken Waldman – Alaska’s Fiddling Poet. I interviewed him last Friday while sitting on stage at the Jalopy Theater in Brooklyn, just prior to his show there that night. Ken is an ex-college English professor who taught via telephone to Inuit villagers on the Aleutian Islands that stretch between mainland Alaska and Russia in the Bering Sea. He now tours the country constantly, reciting his poetry and playing his fiddle. Ken has played everywhere from the Kennedy Center to nightclubs to small independent bookstores. He is celebrating the release of a new prose book, a memoir called “Are You Famous?” and a new double CD of his own fiddle tune compositions called “55 Tunes, 5 Poems.” Great stuff!

Martin Carthy Radio Programs

8 Comments

Picture of: Martin Carthy

Back in 1994 British folk musician and scholar Martin Carthy hosted a series of 6 radio broadcasts on the BBC 2 station. I recently got my hands on cassette tapes of these broadcasts, and they’re awesome! He did a really good job- plays some amazing music. I digitized the tapes, and here they are. The first tape is programs 1-3, Jan-Feb 1994 and the second is programs 3-6, Feb-March. You will notice in the middle of each tape it cuts off and then cuts back in, that’s where the tape side switches. I really recommend these shows, fun to listen to.

Enjoy!

Interview with Hubby Jenkins

Leave a Comment

On today’s show I speak with Hubby Jenkins, a great young blues musician and songwriter from New York. Hubby (short for Hubert) is 22 and has been playing old blues and folk music for about 5 years. He’s doing great stuff with the old material and writing great new songs as well! He plays live in the studio, talks about his background, the current state of affairs for folk musicians in NYC, and plays a bunch of his favorite records.

Hubby plays as part of the Roots ‘n’ Ruckus music collective down at the Jalopy Theater every Wednesday, and also plays many other gigs through out the city, the North East, and everywhere in his ramblings throughout the country.

Links:

Interview with Baby Gramps

2 Comments

Baby Gramps

On today’s show I interview blues/jazz/country/everything musician Baby Gramps. Gramps was in NYC on tour from the West coast. I ran into him at the Jalopy Theater and we arranged to meet for an interview the next day at Zebulon, another Brooklyn club where he was playing a show. This interview takes place out on the street. We talk about his early days back in the 60’s hanging out with Furry Lewis, Jesse Fuller and Elizabeth Cotton, hunting for old 78’s at the “Starvation Army,” hear some old records he was influenced by and play a bunch of tracks from his excellent new CD, “Baptized on Swamp Water.”

See below for links associated with today’s program:

Podcasting Special – Interview with Dan Patterson

Leave a Comment

On this episode of Down Home Radio, Eli interviews his own roommate, Dan Patterson. Dan is a reporter for the Talk Radio News Service and is an expert on the medium of Podcasting and “Social Media” in general. He hosts his own awesome podcast, The Creepy Sleepy Show – “Independent Music, Independent Politics,” featuring his own amazing reporting from his recent trip to Darfur as well as his on site reporting on the massive flooding in his own home state of Iowa. On today’s show Dan and Eli sit around their apartment, smoke a hookah and discuss the medium of Podcasting itself, its history and its future!

Interview with the East River String Band

3 Comments

East River String Band

This week Eli interviews Eden Brower and John Heneghan- The East River String Band about their new CD/LP “Some Cold Rainy Day,” with artwork by R. Crumb. They play some cuts from the new record, and also delve into John’s extensive collection of rare 78 RPM records, playing a bunch of un-reissued records you won’t hear anywhere else!

The East River String Band will be playing this Saturday night, June 14th at my Down Home Live show at Banjo Jim’s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. No Cover! Come and check it out, should be a great show.

Links:

Interview with Willy Gantrim

2 Comments

Willy Gantrim

This week I’ll speak with New York based blues/country musician and songwriter Willy Gantrim. We both play as part of the Roots ‘n’ Ruckus music collective, every Wednesday at the Jalopy Theater in Redhook, Brooklyn. Willy’s been writing great songs, and has just returned to New York from New Orleans, where he spent the winter busking as well as playing shows. We had a good interview about his background, and Willy plays some blues and originals live on the air!

Best of the Down Home “Awesome Out of Print Records” series vol. 1

5 Comments

Hello everybody- well for the past couple months pretty much all I’ve been doing here is digitizing and posting up old out of print LPs from my collection, for what has been known as Down Home Radio’s “Awesome Out of Print Records” series. I’m gonna be doing that in fits and starts from here on out, but I think I’m gonna call this first round complete and start back producing regular episodes of Down Home Radio. I’ve got a lot of good interviews waiting to come out!

On this show I have put together a play list of a bunch of my favorite tracks drawn from all the records I’ve posted up. It was hard to choose which tracks to play, because there are so many great ones on these albums! This show serves as a sampler, and you can go back and download all the records and listen to them in their entirety!

Track list for today’s episode:

Oh Mother It Hurts Me So: Traditional Music from Central Pennsylvania

2 Comments

Cover of the LP: Oh Mother It Hurts Me So
Click Here to Download

Here’s the latest addition to the Down Home “Awesome Out-of-Print Records” series, and I think the last for a little while since I want to get back to producing regular radio shows, I got a lot of good interviews that are waiting to be posted.

This record is great! Its a collection of fiddle, harmonica and vocal music (sometimes accompanied by 4-string banjo and guitar) from central Pennsylvania recorded by Ray Allen in 1979 and originally released by the Union County Historical Society’s Oral Traditions Project. This is not your typical “old-time music;” the musicians represented here are the decedents not only of early Scots-Irish settlers, but also of immigrants from Germany and Italy and the songs and tunes they play reflect that in a wonderful way. Great stuff! And I love that cover photo.

As usual, I have selected this LP from my record collection, played it into my computer, chopped up the tracks, scanned the front and back of the LP, and here it is!

See below for track information:

Big Bill Broonzy: Live at Club Montmarte, Copenhagen 1956

3 Comments

Big Bill Broonzy Live in Copenhagen 1956
Click Here to Download

While looking through my record collection the other day, I realized that this had to be the next addition to the Down Home “Awesome Out-of-Print Records” series. This record is awesome. I first heard it coming over the PA before a show my band was playing at the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, Poland in 2004! All I heard that day was Big Bill’s version of “The Glory of Love,” but I was blown away. Eventually I found out that it was from this record and tracked down a copy. What a revelation. This is possibly my favorite Big Bill. Maybe that’s because his set at this live show is kind of a greatest hits of folk music, so he does a bunch of favorites. But he does them so well! There’s great versions of songs you might not think he had covered like “Take This Hammer,” “Midnight Special,” “I Get the Blues When It Rains,” and even “Sixteen Tons”!

See below for notes from the back of the record and more track information.