Tag Archives: radio

The Shows go on – and on – –

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Jack gets over the line again – –

A very odd coincidence happened on Monday evening.

I’ve been producing and presenting a weekly Celtic music show on the NPR station in Johnson City Tennessee for nearly twenty years now (WETS.fm). It’s called ‘Celtic Clanjamphry’ and initially airs on their main FM and HD1 channel on Sunday evenings and then repeats on their HD2 channel on Mondays and Saturdays. It then goes out on WEHC.fm here in Virginia on the following Sunday. Because I record them ahead of time with the enormous help of my engineer Dirk, I’m never quite sure which episode is airing any particular week. I got a message on Monday morning from a listener and so I checked the Monday evening repeat to check which one was going out.

Wendy interviewing a turtle

But – –

A few months ago Wendy started working part-time for West Virginia Public Radio as a producer and presenter for their show called ‘Inside Appalachia’ which goes out there on Sunday mornings and is then re-broadcast on a whole host of other NPR stations from Ohio to Georgia, and Kentucky to North Carolina. One of the stations that takes it is – yes – WETS.fm in Johnson City!

Last week her first program came 2nd in Best Feature at the AP Virginias Broadcasting awards, out of more than 400 entries from all over Virginia and West Virginia which was very exciting! Her latest story is all about a 10 year search for the maker of hand thrown clay mugs. It’s quite a moving story!

On Monday past, at 8pm I went to the WETS website to check which of my programs was being broadcast on HD2. Lo and behold, to my surprise they were airing ‘Inside Appalachia’ on their fm/HD1 channel at exactly the same time, and it was Wendy’s mug story! So we were both on the same station at the same time!

So I went to Wendy and told her this and with a big grin on her face she said, “Hmm, which one shall we listen to?”

I’m a smart husband…..

The Voices of the People – –

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This weekend I am going to Burr Oak in Gloucester, Ohio to attend the Inside Appalachia Folkways reporters annual retreat.

We’re going to play with soundboards, learning how to make people’s voices mesh with the soundtrack of their stories. We’re going to get advice on fading in and fading out and when to tell the story in our own words and when to use our informants’ voices.

It’s fascinating. I’ve been involved in storytelling as a profession or job skill since high school. I always knew the sound of a human voice (or the flying fingers of someone telling in sign language) was one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Get the right voice in the right accent onto the right public platform and you can change the world—for good or ill, so be careful. In the last ten years or so I’ve taught a lot of health officials and students how misinformation flows through astroturfing, and how to distinguish between honest voices and agenda pushers.

Storytelling with a soundscape is awesome. It gives you a new palette of tools. The human voice needs to be enhanced–but not overwhelmed–by sounds that support the story. A pottery wheel spinning beneath a woman talking about the joy of clay creations. The slide of yarn over a crochet hook is so slight a sound we don’t tend to hear it in the noise of our day. There’s a metaphor in there. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pointing it out.

So I look forward to a glorious weekend of relax-and-learn with fellow storytellers in the soundscape world. And I feel so lucky. It’s a great gig, finding interesting concepts and amplifying them to other people who can hear themselves described in the Appalachian voices (and pottery wheels, and crochet hooks et al) and say “that’s like me!” It is a powerful thing to affirm people’s identities in a big way by finding and producing a story that might have gotten subsumed in the larger noises of the world.

More from Wendy next week