Tag Archives: good times

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

Some Moments in Time —

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Another musical post from Jack – –

Back around 1964 my old singing partner Barbara Dickson and I shared the stage a few times with a couple of guys called ‘Robin and Clive’ (Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer). They played regularly in a club in Edinburgh – Robin singing Irish and Scottish songs and playing guitar, while Clive played banjo and sang Appalachian songs and blues. They were at the forefront of things and very, very good!

They were so good that they were signed up to make a recording. So they decided to recruit a third person and give themselves a collective name. The third member was selected after auditions were held – unheard of then in the world of folk music! The successful applicant was Mike Heron, whose previous experience was in rock groups – he had played at the notorious ‘Snakepit’ near my hometown. The name they chose was ‘The Incredible String Band.’

Their first album was a big hit and created a stir outside of the folk world. There are reports that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were influenced by them, and there’s another report that Bob Dylan said that Robin’s ‘October Song’ was “quite good” (maybe Robin didn’t know that that means very good in America).

But Clive wasn’t happy with the group’s direction, so he headed off on the ‘hippie trail’ to India and beyond.

Time to prepare for more prestigious gigs and more records. Robin and Mike recruited their girlfriends, Licorice McKechnie (yes, that was her name) and Rose Simpson. They quickly learned to play various instruments proficiently, and the band became a foursome.

The next thing was being booked for Woodstock, which didn’t go too well – – –

But they continued to tour and played many big concerts at famous venues.

I’m a big fan and always have been from their very earliest days – here they are, and it was hard to pick just one, but it has to be this: The Incredible String Band: “This Moment”

Next week, more from Jack