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Rolling Along on the Airwaves

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Jack’s Wednesday guest post written in between trick or treaters showing up – –

A few weeks ago I posted about the odd and strange ways that I found myself singing songs all around Europe and America.

Much the same is true of my radio experiences over the years. That started in the late 1980s when my good friend Rab Noakes was working as a producer at the BBC in Glasgow. He got the idea of a weekly folk music program on a Friday night but with knowledgeable guest presenters taking turns. He asked me to do some of them. I didn’t need to learn how to work any equipment – Rab did that.

Not too long after that, another friend got in touch. Alan Brown was doing a weekly show on Heartland fm in Pitlochry called ‘Scene Around,’ but the American lady who subbed for him once a month had moved away. So I ended up replacing her!

Meanwhile my good buddy Wayne Bean had started presenting ‘Keltik Korner’ – a weekly Celtic music program on WETS.fm in Johnson City, Tennessee, and asked if I could send him my Heartland shows. They were taped onto cassettes in the Heartland office as they aired live then mailed across the Atlantic (no internet or cloud back then). When Wayne gave up his show, another one started, and it was presented by Denise Cozad, who continued to take my mine.

Of course, when Wendy and I moved to England it was no longer possible to present a live Sunday lunchtime radio show in Pitlochry. But a few years later we moved to Big Stone Gap in Virginia – just an hour from WETS.fm in Johnson City. I noticed that they no longer had a locally produced Celtic music program, so I emailed the station manager saying where I was and asking was he interested. Within a couple of months I was pre-recording twelve Celtic Clanjamphries and thought that might be the end of the story.

Well – –

It’s been fourteen years and approaching eight hundred programs, and my show now airs on two different NPR stations. And now I work with a good friend, who became my engineer back in Wise, who lives in South Carolina now. Quarterly, Wendy and I travel to SC to hang with Dirk Wiley and his wife, Martha. Wendy, Dirk, and Martha all do guest shows, so it’s become something of a family affair.

Come back next Wednesday for more from Jack

Pumpkins Bursting With Opportunity And Community

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Many people know Wendy as a writer, but in her day job she runs a medical non-profit. This post is about the monthly outing with her non-profit sponsors.

Today I am off to help kids in a rent-controlled apartment complex paint pumpkins – by which I mean I sourced where to get free pumpkins, bought paint, and will pick up the pumpkins on the way there.


The kids will have a good time. So will their parents. They will sneak down to the picnic shelter after 20 minutes or so, have a snack, and look at what their kids are doing. They will say things like “Good job” or “What’s that supposed to be?” They will look at the extra pumpkins, and paints, then look around.

One of us who are in charge will smile and say, “Want to do one yourself?” and the parent will shake their head: no no, these are for the kids.

“We will have so many left over we can’t take back with us, seems a shame to waste them,” one of us who are in charge will say. And a minute later the parent will be sitting down at the edge of the group, tentatively reaching for a brush.

Most of them didn’t get childhoods. No one stood over them and said “Good job” or “what’s that supposed to be?” The fact that their kids are whooping it up with stuff they didn’t provide makes them maybe a little sad, maybe a little relieved, these parents who were never children themselves.

After a few minutes, those of us in charge will realize a couple of the parents are amazing artists. We will admire their pumpkin, ask them how long they’ve enjoyed drawing. We will sneak to the craft bin and take out some extra stuff from an event I ran last month, where doctors and their children who were waiting for supper could watercolor on small canvases.

We will ask them if they want a couple of canvases, if they know their neighbor who is also having a grand time painting, and which of the two of them should take home these leftover watercolor paints so they could be shared.

It’s just pumpkins, another day in the life of a bunch of people society blames for their own poverty. It’s just a monthly do-gooding session by a bunch of medical students doing community outreach.

But those medical students are watching what happens when kids and parents have childhoods—maybe together. And those parents are creating community because they’re talking to each other about their pumpkins.

And the directors of the event are watching the pre-med students watch the apartment
complex population come alive with joy, all of them having a good time. Nobody is lecturing anyone about nutrition, but the students just scooped the pumpkin guts into Tupperware and handed them off with recipe cards and small jars of spices and oil.

We’re changing the world, one parent, one pumpkin, one medical student at a time.

Because we’re prioritizing joy, community, and understanding each other.

When these medical students get into residency and hear “poor people make poor choices” and “they’re not interested in changing,” they will remember the pumpkins, the parents, the paints, and the laughter that said a little more loudly: “We’re people who want lives with happiness in them, and we’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got.”

And they will say, “Excuse me, but….”

And I cannot wait until these medical students enter residency!