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