Category Archives: My Back Pages

The 60’s Family Entertainment Center

Dumont Teleset Family Entertainment Center

The family entertainment center of the early ’60s usually housed a black-and-white television set that could be hidden by sliding doors when not in use. The countertop featured two hinged lids that when lifted revealed an AM/FM radio receiver on one side and a four-speed stereo phonograph on the other. That would be 16-45-33-78 rpm in case you’re wondering. Our rec room was largely Danish modern with an L-shaped modular sofa and long teak table with a leather insert in the corner. My father won the fight to buy himself a green leatherette La-Z-Boy recliner and our DuMont Teleset Combo Console lacked any description other than Basic Early Sixties Ugly.

My parents moved into a single-family tract home in the Philadelphia suburbs sometime around 1962. There were three models in a 500 home development named Sun Valley that pretty much looked identical and ranged in price from $14,990 to $18,990. A few miles north, the same builder created a more upscale community he called Pine Valley, with homes distinguished by their brown cedar siding versus our more affordable white asbestos. They had larger lot sizes and the prices started at $19,990. Another commonality was that the homes were not sold to people of color, and our neighborhood was marketed primarily to first-born, assimilated Jewish-American families.

Like in thousands of similar postwar “white flight” planned communities of that time period built throughout the country, there was a similarity in the split-level home design: living room, dining room, three or maybe four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a small kitchen, perhaps a basement for laundry and storage, a one-car garage and the rec (for recreation) room. While the latter might also be called a den based on geography, it was the family gathering place. The living rooms were often filled with French or Italian provincial heavy wood furniture with couches encased in plastic upholstery covers, used only by adults on special occasions. But everybody utilized the rec room, and the centerpiece was the family entertainment console.

 

The television was the big draw for our ritual gatherings. I have a strong recollection of my mom and I watching  Lee Harvey Oswald get shot to death live on the air as it happened. The entire family came together for the three Ed Sullivan shows in early 1964 that featured The Beatles. And before or after dinner we’d watch Walter Cronkite on CBS News, reporting about a war in a faraway place called Viet Nam. By the end of the ’60s, my sister had moved out, and when my parents were asleep I’d smoke a little weed, sit on dad’s La-Z-Boy, pour myself a Pepsi, eat a few Tastykake Juniors and maybe a bag of Wise potato chips, and watch Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

My sister never really used the stereo system too often. Mom and Dad had a small record collection that consisted of Enoch Light and The Light Brigade, a half-dozen Broadway soundtracks, a couple Mario Lanza Italian classics (dad knew him from the old neighborhood), several Sinatra albums, Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, and Sammy Davis at the Coconut Grove.

Up until I was given my own portable stereo for my bedroom when I turned 14, I would use the family console for my very small album collection: a budget Ray Charles album, Meet the Beatles in mono that I bought for 99 cents at Korvettes, the Anthology of American Folk Music my aunt gave me, and some stuff I stole from my sister’s room: about a hundred 45 rpm singles from the ’50s and Joan Baez’s debut album.

In 1969, while my parents were on vacation, my friends and I held our first group “acid test” in the rec room and used the console to play Firesign Theater and Pink Floyd albums while letting the television play with the sound off. It was a few months after Woodstock, and although memories are understandably fuzzy, it culminated at around seven the next morning when I got the idea to wake up the entire neighborhood with Ummagumma‘s “Grantchester Meadows.” A couple of us wheeled my six-foot-high, 200-watt guitar amp out on the front sidewalk, used a hundred feet of speaker wire to connect it to the console, and blasted at full volume the song that kicks off with birds chirping.

The Philadelphia police, not exactly known for their community relations skills, were very kind that day. After cruising by the house a few times, with a dozen strung out hippies sitting on the lawn, they finally pulled up in front of the house, motioned me over to the patrol car, and said “Son, you clearly aren’t getting our message. We’ll be back in two minutes and if your amp and friends aren’t inside the house, we’ll be hauling all your asses to jail and will shave your little hippie heads.”

I kept my hair that day, and the fond memories of our DuMont family entertainment center will forever remain in my thoughts.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

The Porter Wagoner Show

Photo via The Country Music Hall of Fame

Like a lot of other families back in the 1950s, we owned a black-and-white television that sat in our parlor in front of the old red couch. It had a tiny little screen built into a large walnut cabinet and it was where I watched my favorite cowboy and Western shows that were popular back then. Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Have Gun – Will Travel, Kit Carson, The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, The Rifleman, Davy Crockett, and all the rest. In the afternoons my sister watched and danced to American Bandstand, and after we went to sleep my folks would tune in adult shows like M Squad, Perry Mason, or The Naked City.

I was probably about 10 or 11 when my dad decided to step up our game by purchasing a 19-inch Zenith “portable” TV that weighed about a thousand pounds and was placed on a wheeled cart in my parents’ bedroom. It had a built-in rabbit-ears antenna and came with a small box that sat on the top with a round wire antenna screwed in. Although we wouldn’t have color until sometime after Apollo 11 and the moonwalk, we were one of the first on the block to get the low-budget UHF stations. Along with the three regular network stations, we now doubled our pleasure. Roller Derby, wrestling, and reruns of old shows were standard fare for these new stations, but it was The Porter Wagoner Show that I fell in love with.

“The Thin Man from West Plains” got his start in Missouri when his band The Blue Ridge Boys got their own radio show, and they broadcasted from the butcher shop where Wagoner worked. In 1951 he signed with RCA Victor, but it wasn’t until four years later that he got his first number one single, “A Satisfied Mind.” A featured performer on ABC-TV’s Ozark Jubilee, he and his musical and business partner Don Warden relocated to Nashville in 1957 and joined the Grand Ole Opry. Over the next 25 years, Wagoner’s singles charted 81 times.

In 1960, with the Chattanooga Medicine Company as his sponsor, The Porter Wagoner Show made its debut. The 30-minute syndicated show broadcasted for an amazing 21 years. There were 686 episodes filmed, with the first 104 filmed in black-and-white. Each show included a couple songs by Wagoner and his band, one by the regular “girl singers” like Norma Jean, above, perhaps a gospel number, comedy from Speck Rhodes or Curly Harris, and the finale,  often featuring the entire cast performing.

Tall and thin with a blond pompadour and usually dressed in rhinestone Nudie suits, Wagoner had an easy manner about him, was a congenial host, and throughout his music career pretty much stuck to classic country and spirituals. The first five years of the show featured Norma Jean, followed by Jeannie Seely for one season, and then, in 1966, 21-year-old Dolly Parton joined the cast. Together they released 13 duet albums and had 14 top ten hits, with Wagoner acting as producer and arranger for not only these, but also Parton’s early solo albums.

After seven years of working together, Parton left, prompting Wagoner to file a breach of contract lawsuit against her. They eventually settled out of court and didn’t reconcile again until shortly before his death in 2007. She sat with him on the day he passed away.

Parton explained her reason for leaving in a September 2008 Los Angeles Times article:

“I worked with Porter Wagoner on his show for seven years, and he was very much — I don’t mean this in a bad way, so don’t play it up that way — but he very much was a male chauvinist pig. Certainly a male chauvinist. He was in charge, and it was his show, but he was also very strong-willed. That’s why we fought like crazy, because I wouldn’t put up with a bunch of stuff.

“Out of respect for him, I knew he was the boss, and I would go along to where I felt this was reasonable for me. But once it passed points where it was like, your way or my way, and this is just to control, to prove to you that I can do it, then I would just pitch a damn fit. I wouldn’t care if it killed me. I would just say what I thought. I would do like the Doralee character and say, ‘I would turn you from a rooster to a hen if you don’t stop!’”

Before she left the show, she wrote “I Will Always Love You” for him, and it went on to become one of her most beloved songs.

Wagoner and his band did a promotional appearance at the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jerse, just across the bridge from Philadelphia when I was about fourteen. I got my parents to drop me off there, and  I stood at the lip of the stage as they played and just soaked up the Western outfits they all wore, the pedal steel guitar player, and, of course, Dolly.

Over the years, up until it went off the air, I’d check out the show from time to time, but it was the early black-and-white episodes that really left their mark on me. You can check out the list of guests here on Ranker, and if you want to see the full episodes they’re currently broadcasted on RFD-TV in America and the United Kingdom, and you’ll find many on YouTube. Let’s close it out with Willie, without the hair.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, herealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Luis Gustavo Alvarez: A Ground Zero American Hero

I’ve never considered submitting a weekly music column to No Depression to be hard work. Given the latitude I’m given to cover basically whatever pops into my mind rather than being assigned a particular topic, it’s rarely been too difficult to come up with something that hopefully readers will find of interest. On a few occasions I’ve gone off the beat, straying into areas or events that are topical and in the news, and perhaps at times controversial. I’ve gotten feedback from many  folks to “just stick to the music”. Sometimes I try but No I can’t.

I’ve been troubled these past few weeks, or maybe a deep funk would be a better way to describe it. I can pinpoint the first time I felt the knot in my stomach; it was around the Fourth of July. A man had just died of cancer, and his obituary said it was linked to the three months he spent at ground zero of the 9/11 attacks searching for survivors and bodies that he helped pull out of the toxic soil. Luis Gustavo Alvarez was only 53 years old.

After he graduated high school in 1983, Alvarez joined the Marines, and after serving he attended classes at City College in New York. He joined the NYPD in 1990 and was a detective in the narcotics division when we were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. The New York Times‘ obituary noted that before he retired in 2010 he was recognized five times for his excellent police work. He then took a job with the Department of Homeland Security, until he was diagnosed with cancer and it became too debilitating to continue.

Two and a half weeks before he passed away, Alvarez went to Washington, DC, to testify before the House Judiciary Committee and urge them to continue offering health benefits to first responders who have fallen ill. “I did not want to be anywhere else but ground zero when I was there,” he said at the hearing. “Now the 9/11 illnesses have taken many of us, and we are all worried about our children, our spouses and our families and what happens if we are not here.” (Fox News)

Luis Gustavo Alvarez was born in Cuba. He was an immigrant who came to America, became a citizen, served his country, and was a hero to many for his efforts. And at death’s doorstep he had to plead in front of the politicians in Washington to put forth what should be the simplest, most nonpartisan, no-brainer effort: Give aid to the survivors. The House passed its bill to extend funding for the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, but a vote on the Senate measure was blocked by Sen. Rand Paul, who cited cost concerns.

Less than two weeks after Alvarez’s death, our House of Representatives voted to condemn the president of our country for using racist language. Using his favorite communication tool, he had lashed out at four Democratic women of color — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — tweeting that they should “go back” to their home countries despite the fact that all four of the women are US citizens and three were born in this country.

Back on Labor Day in 1980, when Republicans were conservative but not yet the xenophobic white nationalist party of today, candidate Ronald Reagan stood with the Statue of Liberty in the background and said this about immigrants:

“These families came here to work. They came to build. Others came to America in different ways, from other lands, under different, and often harrowing conditions, but this place symbolizes what they all managed to build, no matter where they came from or how they came or how much they suffered. They helped to build that magnificent city across the river. They spread across the land building other cities and towns and incredibly productive farms. They came to make America work. They didn’t ask what this country could do for them but what they could do to make this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. They brought with them courage, ambition, and the values of family, neighborhood, work, peace, and freedom. They came from different lands but they shared the same values, the same dream.”

In January 2018, the current Republican president shared his thoughts on immigration:

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

Ask Luis Gustavo Alvarez, an immigrant and true American hero.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Music Business Blues: 1972-1974

Photo by Stuart Hampton/Pixabay License

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” — Hunter S. Thompson

My wife and I were just 20 years old on our first wedding anniversary and were living once again in Philadelphia. We’d spent the previous winter in Toronto after eloping the old-fashioned way: I picked her up for a date, she tossed her suitcase to me out the window, we said “see you later” to her mom and headed off to the airport in a smoky car with a load of friends. With maybe a couple hundred bucks in our pockets, we sat white-knuckled inside a small twin-prop bouncing up and down in a snowstorm and fortunately weren’t hassled too badly by the customs officers when we touched ground. The next morning we were walking in the snow toward the city when a guy driving an Austin Healey Sprite with the top down pulled over and asked in broken English, with a little French thrown in, if we needed a place to stay. In less than an hour we were inside his warm, huge Victorian home filled with friendly people who shared food and smoke. I think our large furnished room cost only about $20 a week, and everybody contributed food for the communal meals. It was December 1971, and that’s how things happened back then.

A year later we were back home, I was registered at the university and she had just gotten a job at an independent record distributor. It was a bit different in those days, as the indies collectively owned about 65% of the market share and were still a decade away from being swallowed up by the big corporations. Every geographical area had several distributors who sold music as there was very little national distribution, and the company she worked for handled RCA, ABC-Dunhill, Chess/Checker, BASF, Roulette, Impulse, CTI, Playboy, and a few dozen others I can’t recall at the moment. It was a cool place to hang out and I was there every afternoon after I finished my classes, until the boss grew tired of me and said that I had to work if I wanted to stay. They put me in the mailroom where the radio promotion guys had their offices, and it was my first taste of the hustle and the game.

Before MTV and the internet there was really only one way to promote your music, and that was radio. Even though there was — and still is — a Billboard Top 100 chart, stations rarely played more than a couple of dozen songs and the competition to get airplay for your label’s records was fierce. The promo guys were the ones who were responsible to do whatever it would take to get in rotation, and it was a business built on relationships, personality, muscle, cash, drugs, and sex. Outside of one Sunday morning gospel show on a small station in Philly, there were zero women on the air at the time, creating a machismo atmosphere where anything goes, and it did.

For almost two years my job was packaging and sending out singles and albums to all the stations in our area, which went north to the coal region, south to Delaware, east to the Jersey Shore and west to Harrisburg. I learned all the call letters, the names of the music directors and DJs, and why a tiny station in Scranton or Allentown was important to pay attention to. It worked like a ladder: You got adds in the boonies, moved up to the secondary markets, and then worked the big city stations hard. Promo guys were on small salaries, with bonuses handed out based on what they were able to accomplish. With maybe 40 or 50 promo guys in a major market, and stations adding fewer than five new songs each week, it could be a bare-knuckles life.

It had been about a dozen years since the infamous payola congressional hearings and scandal that put many disc jockeys out of work, the most famous being Alan Freed. The feds prosecuted them on tax evasion charges for not reporting the money they received from the labels, but there were many other ways to cheat and steal: Freed’s name is still on dozens of singles as a co-writer, and Dick Clark held a stake in a publishing company and label for many of the artists who appeared on American Bandstand that he quickly dropped like a hot potato. Instead of going away, payola continued unabated and I’m sure that even today it continues in some form or another. Think of the “social media influencer,” for example.

During my years in the mailroom I routinely slipped plastic bags of white powder and weed inside promo albums, packed boxes with stacks of twenties, and bought money orders to pay for a music director’s monthly mortgage or car payment. Cases of liquor, expensive suits, a new appliance for the house, and tickets to any sports event or concert. Weekend getaways to Miami or Las Vegas were handed out like candy. And if someone needed companionship, it was just a phone call away. One promo guy I worked for, who would later have a book written based on his life, would sometimes carry a gun into his meetings and had a special relationship with organized crime syndicates from two cities. And then there was the popular music director and disc jockey who took in so much cash that he had to open an adult bookstore to help launder it.

With all the money flowing, you might think that individual record sales were so astronomical that it all paid for itself. Not quite. The music business has always been a “one percent scam,” where a handful of successful artists subsidize everyone else’s shortfalls. Throw a bowl of spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks was the model, and to understand the micro-economics you’d have to be like Trump and graduate from “the Wharton School of Finance.” In my two years of hanging out with the promo dudes, I learned that it wasn’t the life for me. But working with musicians, having access to great music, and earning a living while doing it sounded like a good career path. And for the next 30-plus years that’s just what I did. More on that another day, another time.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at the website of No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Johnny Cash Show: Americana Lost and Found

ABC TV Promotional Photo 1969/IMDb.com

Bill Carruthers was in his late 20s in 1959 when he got the nod to become the director of The Soupy Sales Show as it became nationally syndicated. He moved his family to Los Angeles from Detroit, and eventually worked mostly as a director, creator, and producer of game shows including The Newlywed Game, The Dating Game, Give-N-Take, The Neighbors, Second Chance, and my personal favorite, Lee Trevino’s Golf For Swingers. He formed his own self-titled production company and along with Screen Gems’ Joel Stein produced The Johnny Cash Show for ABC.

Between its debut on June 7, 1969, and until its end on March 31,1971, there were 58 episodes taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Along for the ride with Cash was his wife, June, The Carter Family, The Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins, and The Tennessee Three. It was originally a summer replacement for the Saturday night variety show Hollywood Palace, but it often landed in the top 20 of the Nielsen ratings, eventually making its way to a regular primetime rotation.

Featuring a blend of guests that were attuned to Cash’s own unique musical sensibilities and interests, along with the need of the producers to pander to the mainstream, it was occasionally used as a vehicle for promoting other shows. But the first show set the tone: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, comedienne Fannie Flagg, and fiddle player Doug Kershaw.

That first summer of 1969 offered a genre-busting array of guests: Gordon Lightfoot, Linda Ronstadt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joe Tex, Glen Campbell, The Monkees, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, O.C. Smith, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia, Charley Pride, The Staple Singers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

 

In January 1970 the show was back on the air and the first show’s guests were Arlo Guthrie, Jose Feliciano, and Bobbie Gentry. Over the next few months Pete Seeger appeared twice, and on Feb. 11 Cash performed this classic duet with Ray Charles.

The 1971 roster of shows continued showcasing all forms of roots music, including gospel, folk, country, jazz, and rock. The Edwin Hawkins Singers, Derek and the Dominos, David Houston, The Dillards, James Taylor, Kitty Wells, Conway Twitty, Randy Scruggs, and Neil Young were just a few of the guests.

A particular highlight of the show was the appearance of Louis Armstrong. Two years earlier he was suffering from heart and kidney ailments that took him away from performing. In the summer of 1970 he was given the green light by his doctors to resume touring, and he appeared with Cash in October. Soon after, Armstrong had a heart attack that caused him to take another break for two months, and the following summer, on July 6, 1971, he passed away.

After two seasons, The Johnny Cash Show was cancelled, the victim of a cross-network “rural purge” designed to seek out a more contemporary primetime audience that was younger, urban, and suburban. It was an absolutely absurd decision, as Cash’s wide range of guests across different genres, his commitment to both social causes and religion, and his outlaw image made him a cross-generational icon.

The show inspired a chart-topping live album of the same name from Columbia Records, and with millions of mainstream fans from national television exposure, Cash and his troupe would tour frequently and successfully in the ensuing years. He would also be called to return to primetime television, hosting other variety shows and specials with June by his side. And the best thing? Almost all of the shows, either in their entirety or through highlight clips, are viewable free on YouTube. The complete list of guests can be found on the show’s IMDb page.

Let’s close this out with the final sign-off from the last show on March 3, 1971.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at the website of No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Sachiko Kanenobu’s Japanese Folk-Rock Masterpiece

Photo from SachikoKanenobu.com

Of all the pleasure I may experience in writing about music, it is simply the joy of discovery and hearing something new that offers the greatest reward. Many hours of my day are filled with searching out curated playlists on streaming sites; reading favorite music blogs, e-zines, and books; wandering through digital archives of old music publications that have long ceased to exist; cross referencing at Discogs and AllMusic; and scanning the dozens of daily messages from musicians, labels, and marketing companies seeking my attention.

It is the latter that is most daunting, but I do open each one, at minimum scan the contents, reply if it’s called for, and search for the occasional gold nugget. Since I’m not a music reviewer, most are submissions that are seemingly thrown against the wall in hopes someone might bite and write. Marketing companies in particular put a lot of effort into writing volumes with way too many words about their projects, and most often they’re so uninspired and generic that it leaves me feeling quite sad for the musicians who have spent their precious dollars on what they think might achieve results.

A week ago I received a message from someone representing Light in the Attic, an indie label I am familiar with from their start in Seattle and that has been dedicated since the beginning to building a catalog of quality reissues featuring a wide range of styles and genres, including a healthy dose of Americana and roots music. While their latest project is quite far from that realm, Sachiko Kanenobu’s 1972 album Misora was a previously unknown joy and blessing to these old ears, with a backstory worthy of sharing.

Considered to be one of the first female Japanese singer-songwriters, Kanenobu, who was born in 1948, was only 18 years old when she was signed to Underground Record Club (URC), a subscription-only indie label that didn’t release Misora for six more years. It was recorded in just seven days, mostly done in single takes. But in a “life happens” twist before its release, she met Paul Williams, the American music journalist who founded Crawdaddy magazine, while he was in Japan, became pregnant with his child, and they quickly married and moved to New York. When the album came out her absence and the inability to promote it added a level of mystique, and within the Japanese folk music scene she was regarded as someone with equal qualities to Joni Mitchell and Sandy Denny, with her gentle fingerpicking, upper-range melodic vocals, and lyrics.

In an interview with American guitarist Steve Gunn published earlier this year in The New York Times, Kanenobu spoke about Misora:

“When I was in high school, I used to listen to this album by Donovan, and I actually tried to imitate him. The first one, I think. I tried copying it, but it was so difficult, and so I just created my songs out of attempting to play like that. In Japan around 1967, it was all folk and pop music — Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, bands like that. Later, I got into the Okinawa scale, which is a unique scale, and not very Japanese in style. And then Takashi Nishioka from the band Five Red Balloons said, ‘Why don’t you come over and listen to this record? Don’t you feel like it’s kind of what you’re doing?’ And it was Joni Mitchell. Then I got influenced by Bob Dylan, of course — I love his words. I started reading his song book and it was kind of like my bible. I also got into the group Pentangle.”

Kanenobu kept busy raising her children and working in art galleries, moving to Northern California in 1982. Through Williams’ work and relationships she stayed connected to music.

“Paul brought Bruce Springsteen to come see us in New York — it was very early on,” she continues in Gunn’s New York Times interview. “He sang two songs for us with an acoustic guitar, that’s an amazing memory. Also, I met Bob Dylan — much later, though, when I was living in California. It was at a ball field in San Francisco, around 1980.”

But she didn’t begin making music again until she met author Philip K. Dick in Sonoma and he encouraged her to write again and began producing sessions.

“I wrote some new English songs after Phil had told me I should, instead of in Japanese. He started talking about making an album together — he would produce it and he’d be in the studio this time. That was 1982, around February. I was so excited, and then he died in March. It was so sad, the darkest time in my life. He was like my muse. He always called me and encouraged me and read me short stories and made me laugh. I am actually writing a book about the whole thing.”

Soon after Dick’s death, Kanenobu and Williams divorced and she formed Culture Shock, an alternative band that released albums through the mid-’90s and gained a following in Germany where they often toured. She went electric and sang in English. When Misora was re-released in Japan in the early ’90s to much acclaim, she released two Japan-only solo albums in 1995 (It’s Up to You) and 1999 (Sachiko).

Today at 71, she is astonished and elated that her early music has been rediscovered. Last November, she returned to Tokyo to play Misora live in its entirety for the first time, and was joined by old pals including Haruomi Hosono, the record’s producer. In America she has been doing select concerts, opening for Steve Gunn. Next month, Light in the Attic will be releasing remastered deluxe physical copies of Misora for the first time in America (the digital versions are already available on streaming sites) on vinyl and CD, each with lots of bells and whistles for her fans.

This week’s column is one of many that I consider simply a labor of love. Misora goes far beyond its reputation, restating the importance of preserving art and music. Hats off to Light in the Attic for their continued vision and execution, and I sure am glad that I take the time to check my messages every day. You just never know what you’ll find in the inbox.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Rotes Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Bluegrass Revival: What Americana Music Can Learn

A while back I wrote a column titled “The Aging of the Americana Music Audience,” and expressed concern that as baby boomers get older there may not be a younger crowd to replace them. This topic has been on my mind for years, as I have witnessed it firsthand time and time again at concerts, festivals, and clubs. After seeing 26-year-old award-winning singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist Molly Tuttle play to a crowd largely comprised of folks who could be her grandparents, and also noting that the current Americana Music Association airplay chart lacked diversity in both age and various sub-genres of roots music, I received a lot of feedback. While No Depression has eliminated the ability to post comments, my own Americana and Roots Music Daily page on Facebook lit up with feedback:

Kathy Sands-Boehmer, who has contributed articles on this site and is a concert presenter from the Boston area, shared her insight: “We find the same thing to be true. It doesn’t matter what the age of the artist is … those who support the music are on the more ‘mature’ side. Haven’t been able to crack this nut.”

A folk music fan from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, commented, “I always wonder about the future of these shows in 10 years. Same is true for the local jazz shows I attend. Everyone at these shows appears older than me and I’m in my 60s. Finding the key to attracting a young audience for folk and jazz shows is something that needs to be solved or there won’t be anyone left to attend them.”

And an observation from someone who attended the same Molly Tuttle show I did with a completely different experience: “I am 65 years old. I was at the back of the space and there were younger people and those of all ages. I came to see a guitar slinger (IBMA Guitar Player of the Year for the past two years) and what I saw was a singer-songwriter. This might have a greater appeal to a younger audience but not for me. I was at MerleFest a few weeks previous, and she was one of the main acts I was interested in seeing and she played about the same show. Also, I’m too old for the Mercury Lounge, where you have to stand for the entire time packed like sardines.”

There was a strong consensus that it wasn’t a lack of interest keeping younger people away, but competition from other entertainment options. Gaming, sports, Netflix, cable television, and high ticket prices were cited. Devon Léger, owner of the music marketing company Hearth Music and another No Depression contributor, shared some statistics from Billboard magazine showing that concert attendance is generally growing, including among millennials, but it doesn’t drill down on genres or the type of venues.

Two weeks after my column, Emma John at The Guardian published a story that caught my attention. Titled “Plucked from Obscurity: Why Bluegrass is Making a Comeback,” she gives a deep dive on the genre’s history, politics, geography, cultural aspects, and a change in the audience. The latter gives me hope, and might be applied to the entire Americana genre. She writes:

“Perhaps it’s an issue of geographical constraints — bluegrass’s popularity remains concentrated in a small portion of the southern Appalachian mountains, where the state lines of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee converge. More likely it has simply been considered unworthy of notice: low art, uncomfortably associated with white redneck culture.

Something is changing, though. Acoustic music, live and unfiltered, is in vogue. America’s hipster generation, in its continual search for authenticity, is chasing roots music back to the country’s earliest string bands, and their sound is being replicated in trendy bars in New York, Los Angeles, and London.”

She also acknowledges both Rhiannon Giddens’ efforts in reclaiming the music’s African-American roots and the work of Bluegrass Pride, a Bay Area group advocating for gays and women “in a musical community that is still overwhelmingly white and male.” John goes further, citing the current crop of performers’ ages and backgrounds that are reaching out and opening up to a new audience:

“A progressive, metropolitan scene is, arguably, securing the music’s future. From the highly trained brilliance of Ivy League graduates such as Brittany Haas to the rollicking rock of stadium-fillers Greensky Bluegrass and Trampled by Turtles, their genre-bending efforts are reaching audiences younger and many hundreds of times larger than anything the traditionalists can hope for.”

A suggestion I’d make to the Americana Music Association is to follow the path of the International Bluegrass Music Association when it comes to youth programs. Their outreach to schools, low-cost membership to those under 17, and the Kids on Bluegrass annual showcases not only have made a difference, but also are replicated by dozens of regional bluegrass organizations. In fact, the abovementioned Brittany Haas was only 8 years old when she became a student of Molly Tuttle’s father, Jack. He is highly active in teaching both kids and adults, and is known as the “Dean of Bay Area Bluegrass.” (More about Jack and the entire Tuttle family here.)

Meanwhile, back on my Facebook page, the responses to John’s article came fast and furious. Here were the first two comments:

“Plucked from obscurity? Bluegrass never went anywhere! Hillbilly music? Hell yes! All you gear heads and technophiles need to pay attention. This is a pure form of American music that does not rely on electronics!”

“Having been a long-time bluegrass fan for 60 years, I’m not a big fan of the new style of bluegrass by these younger bands. They seem to think more is better and try to throw in every note and chord known to man. The old timers knew better. I accepted when Seldom Scene came around and changed the style of bluegrass but I don’t know about this new high tech stuff.”

Yikes. So I guess that there is a group of bluegrass fans who aren’t appreciative of the “youngsters” coming up, nor what they bring to the genre. But there is a crack in the sky and I loved reading these counterpoints that came from three of my page’s followers:

“I was thinking about all of this since you posted that last piece about Molly Tuttle. I went to Winter Wondergrass in Lake Tahoe last March. The crowd was overwhelmingly young, people in their 20s/30s. I was kind of surprised by that, but it seemed like a good sign.”

“Just saw Steep Canyon Rangers, originally a modern version of a classic bluegrass band, formed in a college dorm in North Carolina. Now, nineteen years later, they are a big festival band that has held on to a younger crowd by evolving into prog-grass and now jamgrass rock (rock-based drummer with big sound). Most songs are 6-8 minutes with some vocals at beginning and end and a lot of wild jamming in between.”

“One reason for the changes by younger bands may have to do with trying to stay relevant (i.e., marketable) in a time when so many interesting styles of music are available to consumers for dirt cheap. In addition, they probably grew up playing or listening to rock and other types of music when they were teens and may have a hard time playing bluegrass night after night in the traditional way. They need to stay challenged and to experiment.”

Please forgive me if you think that I’m sounding the alarm on a problem that doesn’t exist, but with age comes a tiny bit of wisdom and a whole lot of experience. Musical genres wax and wane in popularity, and sometimes they just simply fade away into obscurity. While American roots music is growing in popularity, it needs new blood on the stage and in the seats in order to thrive and not just survive. At the heart will be a concerted outreach, and we really need people and organizations to drive it.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression:The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.