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Surfing the Airwaves

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Jack hits the mark and gets his guest post in on time – – –

My first stab at presenting a Celtic music show on radio was for the BBC in Glasgow and then I moved to a monthly program for Heartland FM in Pitlochry for a number of years. That live show ended up being recorded on air and sent to WETS FM in Tennessee as part of a reciprocal agreement. Finally, I moved to Big Stone Gap in VA and was fairly quickly invited to present a weekly show for them. That has been going for almost thirteen years and is also now carried by WEHC FM in Emory VA and Alive Radio in Scotland. It’s called Celtic Clanjamphry (ClanJam for short).

Here’s how it gets put together –

Because I can’t concentrate on working the desk and doing the links between music simultaneously I’ve always had a techy handle the former and had many fine people do that for me over the years. To begin with I’d do the hour and a half drive to the station in Johnson City to pre-record three or four shows at a time, carrying a collection of CDs with all the music arranged in order for each program. But that changed greatly when Wendy and I moved to Wytheville (a much longer drive).

Luckily we’d gotten friendly with Dirk Wiley in Wise and he’s just two hours away and has a very good home studio. He quickly tuned in to my way of working and we were able to move to four and eventually five at a time. Instead of carrying CDs to him I upload folders of music to DropBox and he downloads them ahead of my visit.

But Covid 19 has changed things a bit –

Dirk and I now work at a distance and while he still gets the music ahead of time, He checks and lets me know how many minutes of talk time I have. I do all the uploading of music at my workstation in a corner of our spare room which has my PC, an open reel tape recorder, a cassette recorder and a turntable.

Once I know how many minutes I have it’s time to move to the log cabin in the back yard that used to be the county jail in the 1800s to record the links, the mid show station ident and the short promos that are broadcast during the week ahead of each program. The cabin has thick walls and is well away from any traffic noise!

But it’s not the same as sitting across the desk from Dirk in his studio and blethering back and forward. That always adds a lot to the atmosphere of ClanJams. So now that we’ve all learned more about following the Covid 19 guidelines we think we can safely get back to our usual way of working and both Dirk and I will shortly be sitting, suitably distanced, in the same room – his studio (and the squirrels won’t have to stay quiet in the attic of the jail).

The Monday Book: THE WAY OF TEA AND JUSTICE by Rev. Becca Stevens

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I picked this book up off the counter of my friend Randy’s bookstore Oracle Books. He looked vaguely discomfited and said, “OK but I wanted to read that so bring it back?”

It was returned Saturday. Normally we don’t do Monday books unless they are enthusiastically appreciated, or hated enough to evoke 400 words. Tea and Justice was kinda middling, in all honesty, like a cup of good tea that has cooled.

Its premise is exploring the history of tea tangled with terrible social injustices toward workers, women, how they were denigrated (and worse) in the name of profits. And explaining how Thistle Farms and its sister Magdelene program (helping women leave sex work and addiction) embedded got its tea room up and going even as it struggled to sustain existing businesses and services. The whole book reads something between insightful and advertising how hard Thistle Farms is working to help people.

Tea does have a violent history, which Stevens addresses in one of the chapters. It also has a snobby history, another chapter, and an intellectual history that overlaps with this snobbery. My favorite chapter was the one on the Inklings (Tolkein, Lewis et al) and mortality; drinking tea is lovely, but what will you do with your life as well, Stevens more or less asks.

My beef with the book is that it continually circles in a naval gazing way and tells all its stories one-person-removed. A difficult encounter with a potential funder appears in two chapters, the first time using his undrunk tea steeping into bitterness as an example. The second time, the story bordered on revenge for Thistle Farms, the women’s center on which I had hoped this book would be centered.

Thistle Farms and the Magdelene Center seem like wonderful programs, yet Stevens makes much of their mileage without telling too many stories from them. There are three or four stories from the women at the ends of each chapter, not so much woven in as tacked on. They are moving. They don’t feel integrated into the planning.

So there’s the dilemma. The book has some wonderful insights, but they slide past in a dreamlike fashion, buried under ever-circling spiritual comments and self-plumping of the farm and its work. The book was written more to raise profits and awareness than consciousness, methinks. Which is not a bad thing, given the work the farm does. It just wasn’t as enticing as it might have been. I feel bad giving it a lukewarm review.