Interview with Brett Ratliff & Sylvia Ryerson

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Brett Ratliff at Jalopy
On today’s show I speak with Eastern Kentucky banjo player, fiddler and singer Brett Ratliff and with Cambridge fiddler Sylvia Ryerson.  Brett and Sylvia were en route through New York and stopped in to play a set at the Roots ‘n’ Ruckus show at the Jalopy Theater in Redhook, Brooklyn.  I recorded their set and interviewed them out on the street afterwords (you will hear some trucks going by).  Sylvia, a student at Wesleyan University in CT, spent the summer working at the radio station of the Appal Shop, a community arts organization in Whitesburg, KY that preserves and promotes old time music, the indigenous music of the area.  Brett lives in Whitesburg and has just released a CD of banjo and fiddle tunes and ballads called “Cold Icy Mountain,” on June Appal records, the Appal Shop label.  We’ll hear about all this in the interview, plus a few songs from the new CD and Brett & Sylvia’s live show that night.

Brett Ratliff is returning to Brooklyn on October 3rd to play a show at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, and a square dance the next night up in Greenpoint.  Be sure to check that out, should be awesome!  I’m definitely gonna go.

Banjo Songs of the Southern Mountains LP

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Banjo Songs of the Southern Mountains front by you.
On today’s show I continue Down Home Radio’s “Awesome Out of Print Records” series with and old Riverside LP, “Banjo Songs of the Southern Mountains.” These recordings were made at the 1955 Mountain Dance & Folk Festival held in Asheville, NC – directed by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The record features Obray Ramsey, George Pegram & Walter “Red” Parham, Harry and Jeanie West and “Aunt” Samantha Bumgarner.  Pegram and Parham are an excellent example of an old-time banjo/harmonica duet.  They’re great!

CLICK HERE to download the album Mp3s, divided up into tracks.

See below for track information and album notes:

Interview with Alaska’s Fiddling Poet – Ken Waldman

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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: