Technology and Media

On WDVX, the Barndance Comes to Town

editor — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:54:50 -0700

Marty Stuart (second from right) plays with the Fabulous Superlatives on WDVX's Blue Plate Special, a live radio broadcast performed before a live audience in Knoxville
Photo: Jack Goodwin for the Boston Globe

A culture cannot be kept alive under a piece of glass in a museum
Dewey Balfa

Every weekday from noon until 1 PM a feisty, low-power, listener-supported radio station in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, broadcasts and streams on the web a live music show before a live audience. The Blue Plate Special is produced at WDVX, which the Oxford American magazine has called “probably the best radio station in the world.” While that effusive endorsement may be open to debate, the creativity and passion of the people behind the station -- and the allegiance of its fans around the world -- are not. (With all four of the WDVX frequencies locked in to my truck's radio so that I can always drive within listening range, I'm completely partial.)

The format of live music before a live audience hearkens to a time when radio connected rural communities to the nation and helped develop what we now call country music. Before the advent of television when almost half the country was rural, Saturday night “barndances” were common on many of the 50,000 watt clear channel radio stations. In addition to WSM’s Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, weekly hillbilly/country shows were broadcast in Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte, Fort Worth, Louisville, Richmond, Shreveport, Knoxville, and Wheeling, WV. The Opry is the only one still broadcasting. Locally, to revive live radio music before a live audience after a 50-year absence is significant for all east Tennessee, because Knoxville radio played such a sizeable role in finding and developing early country performers.

Speak Your Piece: Bucking for Hogan Hero

editor — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:55:20 -0700

A Navajo hogan (detail)
near Antelope Canyon, AZ
Photo: Waldemar Koscielny

I admit to girding my mental loins as I sat down to view Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" segment about his time on the Navajo Reservation. Some of his account did make me (even after girding) cringe...

Like his history report -- that reservations were "originally established to give Indians a place to renew their culture” ??!! Whew, guess we missed that opportunity, since the boarding-school era, tribal termination, relocation and other U. S. policies devised to eradicate native cultures distracted our attention.

But, overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the show and Spurlock’s observations as he stayed with the Dennison family, who live in a traditional Navajo manner. I loved that Deborah and Karl made him stay in their hogan in the backyard with no electricity or water. A hogan is a traditional Navajo home; most folks don’t live in them year round but keep one on the property for ceremonial purposes. I’m sure that the producers insisted Spurlock stay in the hogan for “authenticity.” It did underscore, however, the fact that many Navajo don’t have running water or electricity despite water rights guaranteed to them under the Treaty of 1868. Most of their water feeds the big cities of the west.

'It's Time For An Accounting' — A Weekly Newspaper's Story

editor — Tue, 8 Jul 2008 13:45:54 -0700

Neshoba Democrat publisher Stanley Dearman at a memorial for the three civil rights workers murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.

Photo: The New York Times

Jim Prince was a mid-20s reporter in Alabama in 1989 when he received his mailed edition of his hometown weekly newspaper, the Neshoba Democrat from Philadelphia, Mississippi. This edition was a special one. It contained a long interview with Dr. Carolyn Goodman, the mother of a young civil rights worker who was murdered in Philadelphia just a few months after Jim Prince was born in 1964.

The Democrat's editor, Stanley Dearman, conducted the interview with Dr. Goodman at her apartment in New York city. Prince had heard about the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner from his first memories — how the three had been pulled over by a local law enforcement officer in Philadelphia on June 21, 1964, tossed in the Neshoba County jail, released and never heard from again. He knew that the car the three young men were driving was found a few days later, abandoned and burned, and that in early August of that year the bodies of the three — two white and one black — were eventually dug out of a earthen dam. He knew that seven men were eventually convicted on federal conspiracy charges, but none had served more than six years in prison. And he knew that the state had never prosecuted a soul for the killings.

It was Dearman's interview with Goodman, however, that "put a face on them for me," Prince said of the three slain civil rights workers. "I wasn't much older than Andy at the time I was reading the article. I was moved by the way his mother described him. He was athletic. He loved dramatic arts. He was a peaceful person who cared about people. That was a turning point for me, and I decided I had to be in Philadelphia for the (25th anniversary) memorial service." Prince left his job at the daily paper in Alabama and came home to work that summer for the Democrat.

On June 27, the Neshoba Democrat received an award from the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky. The Tom and Pat Gish Award is given for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. The Neshoba Democrat, Stanley Dearman and Jim Prince have shown all that and more over the past four decades.

Pres. Clinton Recommends The Big Sort, by Yonder's Editor

editor — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 09:08:05 -0700

"Some of us are gonna have to cross the street, folks." Former President Bill Clinton broke that news to the audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival

Why No Rural Spots among Forbes' 'Best for Families'?

editor — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 12:38:40 -0700

Looking for "great schools, low crime and a desirable cost of living," Forbes magazine has named "read more