Down Home Radio Show – Page 10 – Down Home Radio is a hardcore, unreconstructed, paleo-acoustic folk music program.

Interview with Frank Fairfield

March 16, 2010 by admin 5 Comments

(photos E. Smith)

On today’s show I speak with Frank Fairfield. I was knocked out by his new album on the Tompkins Square label and was glad to finally catch up with Frank at his home in Los Angeles, CA when I was out there back in January. Frank plays banjo, fiddle and guitar in an old time style and is a really great singer. We talk about his music and his ideas about music in general, Frank plays some tunes live on the show and also plays several favorite 78rpm records from his own collection. Frank Fairfield has a rare gift for interpreting what he calls “the American repertoire.” He gives the music an authentic presence that is very exciting. Frank has embodied the music he plays. Although his repertoire is from a different landscape then we see around us today he has found a way inside and expresses it with emotional depth and energy that is very enjoyable to see live as well as listen to on the record.

Frank plays at Tommy’s Loft in downtown LA.

Brooklyn Folk Festival Preview Concert and Benefit

March 11, 2010 by admin Leave a Comment

Hey everybody, just wanted to let you know about a great show I organized for this coming Saturday at Jalopy:

Please support the production of the 2010 festival by attending –The Brooklyn Folk Festival Preview Concert and Benefit on Saturday March 13th at the Jalopy Theater.

This fabulous show will give you a taste of what is to come at this years festival and will also serve as a benefit to get vital funds necessary to make the Folk Fest possible. I need to fill Jalopy on Saturday night to get enough money to rent a big tent for the outdoor stage, get the festival promoted around town and hire some folks to help me run it, plus incidental expenses. Below is the info. Can’t wait to make this years festival a reality.

Hope to see you there! – Eli (the organizer).

Sat. March 13th 9pm till midnight or whenever it ends!
The Jalopy Theater
315 Columbia Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
(718) 395-3214
www.Jalopy.biz
$10 Cover

p.s. There’s gonna be a raffle with awesome prizes! Plus I’ll have Down Home Radio T-shirts and stickers, as well as Brooklyn Folk Fest 2009 CDs for sale.

Twelve Tunes for Two Banjos

February 24, 2010 by admin 3 Comments

Eli here, you’re trusty Down Home Radio host. When I’m not on DHR playing records and recording interviews, I’m keeping busy by making records of my own! Here’s an album my friend Peter and I did recently. We asked ourselves, “can two banjo players play together?” After some experimentation we were able to answer, “yes!” Here’s a big ad for our new album:

“Twelve Tunes for Two Banjos” is a CD of old-time banjo duets played and sung by Peter K. Siegel & Eli Smith, using mostly 5-string but also 4 and 6-string banjos.

Track List:
(click tune to hear audio samples)

1. The Worried Blues
2. Jesse James
3. Soldier’s Joy
4. Goodbye Booze
5. John Henry
6. Otto Wood the Bandit
7. Marching Jaybird
8. Sweet Betsy from Pike
9. What a Friend We Have in Jesus
10. Poor Boy Long Way from Home
11. Ever See the Devil Uncle Joe?
12. New Prisoner’s Song

To Order:

Go to http://cdbaby.com/cd/siegelsmith where you can order online. Its also on iTunes.

About the Musicians:

These are Peter K. Siegel’s first recorded banjo performances since he played on Elektra’s Old Time Banjo Project in 1964. Says Siegel: “You play this thing long enough, it begins to sound pretty good.”

In the interim, he produced more than 60 albums of traditional and roots-based music. Peter’s productions include albums by Doc Watson, Hazel Dickens, Joseph Spence, Roy Buchanan, Paul Siebel, and Los Pleneros de la 21.

Siegel founded the Nonesuch Explorer Series, for which he produced 15 albums of traditional world music. Folk Roots (UK) called Siegel “one of the earliest shapers of interest in world music.” His Gorô Yamaguchi album, A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky, continues to make its way spaceward in NASA’s Voyager Time Capsule.

His recent three-CD boxed set Friends of Old Time Music was released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The New York Times called the set “a boxed set of awesome and concentrated power” and The Boston Globe called it “a precious, wildly beautiful document.”

Eli Smith is a banjo player, writer, researcher and promoter of folk music living in New York City. He regularly plays in a string band known as The Dust Busters, as part of the Roots ‘n’ Ruckus show at the Jalopy Theater and hosts the internet radio show Down Home Radio. He also presents Down Home Live, every second Saturday of the month at Banjo Jim’s on the Lower East Side as well as the Brooklyn Folk Festival, scheduled for May 21-23rd, 2010.

See below for our review in the Old Time Herald magazine:

Backroads and Banjos with Art Rosenbaum

February 17, 2010 by admin 1 Comment

On today’s show I’m happy to be bringing out a new addition to Down Home Radio. Well known field recordist, painter and musician Art Rosenbaum hosts his own weekly 15 minute radio program, “Backroads & Banjos” on AM 1690, WMLB out of Atlanta, GA. We will be periodically re-airing this wonderful program here on Down Home Radio. Rosenbaum is perhaps best known for his recent Grammy Award winning collections of his own field recordings, “The Art of Field Recording” on the Dust to Digital label.

On this episode Art Rosenbaum and Phil Tanner remembers their friend, guitarist Smokey Joe Miller who passed on in November of 2009. Miller played with 4 generations of Tanners – he played with Gid Tanner in the old original Skillet Lickers back in the 30’s, as well as with Gid’s son Gordon, then Phil and most lately Russ Tanner, the latest member of this Georgia musical family. This 1/2 hour program brings together 2 episodes of “Backroads & Banjos” dedicated to Smokey Joe.

Art Rosenbaum (right) talks with guest Phil Tanner as he tapes a segment of his radio show at AM 1690 in Atlanta, photo from an article about Rosenbaum on AccessAtlanta.com

http://24hourpartypooper.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/080428_bilger07_p646.jpg

Art Rosenbaum plays six string banjo in front of one of his paintings.

Treasures of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress

February 1, 2010 by admin 2 Comments

Joe Hickerson at Jalopy by Down Home Radio etc.
Treasures of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress – a lecture by Joe Hickerson at the Jalopy Theater, Brooklyn, NY 1/16/10

Greetings from California. I’m out on the West Coast playing some shows with my band The Dust Busters and our friends the The Dough Rollers. But I’m still on the job, bringing out Down Home Radio shows! Here’s a recording I made at the Jalopy Theater just before I left town.

Joe Hickerson was the librarian and head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress from the 1960’s-90’s. This is a very cool “lecture-demonstration,” where Joe talks about the Archive of Folk Song/Culture, plays great examples from its collection and also plays and sings some of his favorite tunes from the Archive.

Got more stuff in the can waiting to come out, plus I’ve been making some great recordings as I’m traveling around, so look out for more great stuff here on Down Home Radio!

Joe Hickerson’s appearance at Jalopy was sponsored by:

Joe Hickerson records Mississippi John Hurt for the Library of Congress, 1960’s.

Robert Winslow Gordon, first head of the Archive, with wax cylinder recordings and recording equipment, about 1930. Library of Congress Photo.

And don’t forget to check out the Down Home Radio advert in the Old Time Herald Magazine – www.oldtimeherald.org – lots of great articles, reviews and more!

Remembering Henrietta Yurchenco (1916-2007)

January 17, 2010 by admin 2 Comments

Henrietta Yurchenco, 2006. Photo: Sashenka Lopez.

On today’s show we remember my dear friend, Down Home Radio co-founder Henrietta Yurchenco, who passed away on Dec. 10th, 2007 at the age of 91. Henrietta was a pioneering ethnomusicologist who starting in 1944, hauled hundreds of pounds of recording equipment on mules through the rugged Sierra mountains and lowland deserts of Mexico to make the very first recordings of indigenous music from that country. She was also a pioneer in the field of folk music radio, hosting shows on WNYC starting in 1940 and later WBAI and WNYC again through the 1960’s. She gave Pete Seeger his debut on radio, often had Woody Guthrie on her programs and served as Leadbelly’s producer for his radio program. Later, in the 1960’s she had Bob Dylan and many other performers and scholars of that era on her show. Henrietta was Professor Emerita at the City College of New York, where she taught ethnomusicology for many years.

I met her when she was 89 and we had a great time doing this show together and generally hanging out in the last 2 years of her life. She was a tremendously accomplished person who over a very long career left an amazing musical and historical legacy, some of which has been preserved for us to hear. For a short history of her career read my essay, her obituary from the New York Times, her excellent autobiography, or visit her website.

Every year on the anniversary of her passing I will be bringing out some amazing treasure from her archives for us all to hear as we remember this remarkable woman. Due to this years fund drive this show is a bit late, but I’m happy to bring it out now.

Today’s show is an episode of Henrietta’s 1960’s radio show, “Adventures in Folk Music” for WNYC here in New York. It features Henrietta interviewing a wonderful singer from the Georgia Sea Islands, Mable Hillary (1929-76) who was very involved in the Civil Rights and Peace movements and eventually moved to New York City where she taught in the public school system. Hillary was an amazing singer and performer of blues and unaccompanied songs, as well as traditional game songs and their dances. She performed in the Georgia Sea Island Singers along with Bessie Jones and others. As a side note, I find the contrast of Hillary’s voice and the guitar work of her accompanist to be interesting, beautiful and in several instances quite unique.

[L] Henrietta in Mexico, 1940’s. [R] Henrietta Yurchenco (right) and an unidentified woman, near Zion Methodist Church, St. John’s Island, South Carolina. March 1970.
(Henrietta Yurchenco Collection. Photo by David Lewiston)

HEAR! more from Mable Hillary and others at a 1965 concert in Central Park courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity.

READ! more about Mable Hillary at the Association for Cultural Equity’s website.

And don’t forget to check out the Down Home Radio advert in the Old Time Herald Magazine – www.oldtimeherald.org – lots of great articles, reviews and more!

Thank You for Your Support

January 7, 2010 by admin Leave a Comment

Down Home Radio Continues!

Hello everybody,

Well the fund drive has been a success! Thank you thank thank you thank you to all of you who donated to the program. I am very much looking forward to bringing you many more fun, interesting and educational episodes of Down Home Radio in 2010. The money raised through your donations will be put towards the purchase of new equipment to replace stuff that is getting to be pretty broken as well as to upgrade equipment and software and give me as your host and the program’s producer some compensation for the time it takes to make every episode of Down Home Radio that you see here on the website.

Of course it is still possible to donate to Down Home Radio. If you are a fan of the show and haven’t yet donated, and I know there are many such people out there, its not too late! No donation is too small, $25 dollars and up gets you one of the premiums, but $5 or $10 dollars gets you my everlasting gratitude and the promise of more great episodes of Down Home Radio on a much more regular basis. See below for details.

That said there has been a really great show of support for the program, both in the United States and from our friends in Europe and Canada. That in itself has been inspiring as many of you who donated also wrote into the program to express your appreciation for the show. Thank you.

Down Home Radio can now continue into 2010 as I get back to work doing interviews, spinning records, digging out archival treasures, digitizing LPs and being your source for “the greatest hits of the 1920’s, 30’s and today!”

Keep in touch,

Eli

Save Down Home Radio!

December 2, 2009 by admin Leave a Comment

Hello everybody,

The show’s been going on now for more than 3 years. Its been a great project; a quick look through the archives will show you the depth and scope of what has been aired on Down Home Radio – dozens of in depth radio interviews with well known elders of the folk scene as well as many great new performers you won’t hear about anywhere else, articles, archival materials, tons of amazing old recordings drawn from obscure sources, plus lots of hard to find out-of-print LPs, digitized and posted for your pleasure and convenience, all for free.

But I can’t continue to do the show without your support. Increasing demands on my time from other projects and the rigors of getting along in New York City make it hard to find time for Down Home Radio anymore. If you value this show/archive, recognize it as something unique and much more than just a blog, please support what I’m doing. Down Home Radio needs funds to replace broken equipment, to pay for all the technical, logistical and office expenses involved with the program and to continue to bring you the coverage only DHR can.

With your support DHR can not only continue but will be able to expand its programming and produce new shows of all kinds on a regular basis, as well as pay for ads in magazines and generally increase its profile and listenership. I have not set a specific monetary goal for this fund drive, but rather hope that listeners will show their appreciation for the shows already produced and donate an amount that will offset to a significant degree the cost of its continuing production and progress for a years time.

Check out today’s show to hear music from some of the awesome new performers I would like to have on the show in the future, plus live recordings from the 2009 Brooklyn Folk Festival, sponsored by Down Home Radio and organized by yours truly. I also have a number of great interviews already recorded that I can’t find the time to get to, including Jack Elliott, Del McCoury, Peter Rowan, Jody Stecher, Larry Hanks, as well as Archie Green, Harold Leventhal and Jim Longhi – very important figures in folk music history who are now deceased. That’s why I have staged this fund drive, in an effort to muster the resources to continue this unique voice in the media and add this important material to the public archive that is Down Home Radio.

Down Home Radio is live from the grass roots of the folk revival that’s going on right now. If you appreciate this kind of coverage, please make a tax deductible donation to Down Home Radio, and receive any or all of the 3 awesome premiums listed below.

Thanks. Your host,

Eli

“Eli Smith is the only young musician I know who is single-handedly reporting on the present scene and documenting its continuity with the past.”
– John Cohen, New Lost City Ramblers

Down Home Radio offers innovative coverage you won’t find anywhere else. An excellent program.”
– Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

“Keep on! The people who listen to you really depend on you.”
– Pete Seeger

“Down Home Radio compensates for the lack of traditional folk music of the Americas in both mainstream and niche media by serving as the only national or international resource consistently offering in-depth long form radio interviews with a variety of established figures of the folk music landscape. But even more importantly, the program provides a platform for emerging folk artists who have no alternate outlet for this kind of discourse, giving them a chance to tell their story and perform their music live on the show. As a journalist and fieldworker who is also an active performer, Eli is in a unique position to relay grassroots and cutting-edge coverage of the folk music scene, much like Broadside or Sing Out! magazines did in their early incarnations.”
– Lynette Wiley

The Stuff:

For a $25 pledge, receive a Down Home Radio bumper sticker. For $50 receive the fabulous “Best of the Brooklyn Folk Festival” live CD, 15 songs totaling more than 1 hour of music, only available right here right now. Check out selections from the CD on today’s show! For $75 receive the awesome Down Home Radio Show t-shirt, modeled here by our executive producer!

And the special holiday deal of the century! For $100 receive all three, the bumper sticker, “Best of the Brooklyn Folk Festival” live CD and the t-shirt! What a deal! That’s fully 33% off!

All donations are tax deductible.

[L] DHR T-Shirt [R] CD of live recordings from the festival!

Bumper Sticker

Donate online with a credit card:

Make an easy, secure tax deductible donation to “2nd Mind Music,” my business name, via the Fractured Atlas website.
Click below:

If you would like to donate by check, please make donation checks payable to: “Fractured Atlas” with “2nd Mind Music” in the memo section of the check. 2nd Mind Music is my business name and “Fractured Atlas” is the non-profit that sponsors my getting tax deductible donations. Email me for the mailing address:
DownHomeRadio@hotmail.com.

Once you have made your donation,
please email me at DownHomeRadio@hotmail.com
with your mailing address and what you would like to receive for your money .

Thanks go to Ernesto Gomez and Maria Flores, without whom this fund drive would not have been possible.

Interview with John Cohen

November 25, 2009 by admin 2 Comments

On today’s show I speak with musician, photographer, filmmaker and folk-musicologist John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers. At the time of this interview, conducted in the summer of 2008, John had just come out with a new CD of old recordings called “Berkeley in the 1960’s” on the Field Recorders Collective label. This is a great record label, definitely check them out.

On the show we discuss this excellent new album, but also range over topics including his earliest field work in Kentucky and Peru, his influences as a guitarist, favorite photographers and his advice/anti-advice to students, stemming from his experience as a professor of art. John also demonstrates Hobart Smith’s piano style, which I’ve never heard anyone else tackle before and offers his reflections on his friend Roscoe Holcomb. Recordings John mentions are played throughout.

Apparently whenever the New Lost City Ramblers would go to Berkeley, CA through out the 1960’s, they would have a big jam at a house on Colby Street. John was so impressed by this gathering of musicians at that place and time that in 1970 with the help of Vanguard Records he flew to California to record this sound. They used the left over tape from the Grateful Dead’s Working Man’s Dead sessions at Pacific High studios and recorded some great stuff, but one thing and another it didn’t come out, until now! Musicians on the record are Jody Stecher, Larry Hanks, Sue Draheim, Holly Tannen, Hank Bradley, Sue Thompson, Eric Thompson, Kenny Hall and Bob Potts, Mac Benford and Walt Koken who would later form the Highwoods Stringband.

I’ve been trying to bring this interview out for over a year! Many thanks to Carly Nix for volunteering to edit this interview for airplay, otherwise it might have never got done. Thank you!

Sadly, I would also like to note the recent passing of Field Recorder’s Collective founder Ray Alden. He was a great guy who did really important work. I him met on a couple of occasions, but only briefly and without time to really talk or do an interview. Now its too late, but I hope to do a piece about him as soon as possible.

And – Thanks go to the Old Time Herald magazine for being super cool and running our advertisement. Check it out in the magazine!

Library of Congress Field Recordings LP

November 18, 2009 by admin 1 Comment

Here is an early, influential and fantastic album issued by the Library of Congress in 1942. It was first issued on an album of 78rpm records and then was reissued on this disc early in the LP era. This record AAFS L2, “Anglo-American Shanties, Lyrics Songs, Dance Tunes and Spirituals from the Archive of American Folk Song,” is the 2nd in the “Folk Music of the United States” series and was edited by Alan Lomax.

There’s some pretty amazing stuff on here. In fact, all of it is great. It’s a great record! The field recordings on this album were newly made at the time of the album’s release. This was the latest hot off the press stuff. The field recordists who made these recordings, Alan and Elizabeth Lomax, Pete Seeger, Herbert Halpert, Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin are a good representation of the small group of early modern folklorists busy making field recordings of Southern music at that time.

There’s some clutch stuff on here. These recordings were very influential early on to Pete Seeger, who made several of them, and to the members of the New Lost City Ramblers among others. Mike Seeger has recorded his own versions of many of the song variants found on this album.

Here’s an unfair question: How do you think this record, or better this series, of field recordings edited by Alan Lomax and issued in 1942, relates to the Anthology of American Folk Music, composed of commercially recorded 78s, which was edited by Harry Smith and issued in 1952? Contrary to some popular conceptions, there were amazing and influential compilations of folk music issued before the Anthology…
I will continue to post more volumes from this series, but I think this one is my favorite.

CLICK HERE to download the album cut up into tracks.

See below for track information and notes:

Hey everybody, just wanted to let you know about a great show I organized for this coming Saturday at Jalopy:

Please support the production of the 2010 festival by attending –The Brooklyn Folk Festival Preview Concert and Benefit on Saturday March 13th at the Jalopy Theater.

Down Home Radio Continues!

The Stuff:

Donate online with a credit card:

Contact