by
NARR:
Eli Smith and Henrietta Yurchenco met two years ago. (A mutual friend introduced them to each other). They've got a lot in common: They're both long-time New Yorkers. They have the same political views. They're staunch opponents of the War in Iraq. And they both love folk music.
Eli Smith is twenty-five. Henrietta Yurchenco is ninety-one.
Almost every week they host an Internet radio program together, broadcast from her bedroom, in Chelsea.
They call it "The Down Home Radio Show." They play string-band music from Appalachia. Country blues. Ballads from Mexico. And lately, protest songs.
SOUND:
The Down Home Radio Show (Nov. 4, 2006)
Well, Hello, Eli. "Hello, Henrietta." Listen, today we're going to do a program that will be run just about the time of the elections. "Yep." And we're urging everybody to go out and vote. Now we're going to deal with songs that have to do with the issues of our time. Like, for instance, principal of all: the war. "The war, yes. What, which war? What war?" Well, we're dealing with the Iraq War. "Oh yeah, that war. I almost forgot." The one, the quagmire that we're in right now. "Oh yeah, I heard about that…."
NARR:
Many of the songs they play come from Henrietta Yurchenco's personal collection. Since the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties, she has traveled the world, making field recordings of traditional music. She likes to call it "popular music." Literally: the music of the people.
Smith has his own name for the show.
ACT 1 (00:05):
I call it a hardcore, unreconstructed, paleo-acoustic folk-music program.
NARR:
Robert Cantwell teaches folklore at the University of North Carolina. He says that, for a long time, ever since the folk boom of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties ended, it was hard to hear, what he calls, old time music, like Yurchenco and Smith play on their program.
ACT 2 (00:04):
You really had to search high and low to find old-time music.
NARR:
He says that the Internet has made it easier to find rare, esoteric recordings.
ACT 3 (00:06):
You can get virtually any kind of music all the time anywhere.
NARR:
Eli Smith says that, even though more and more people have access to all sorts of music online, few shows that play as many different kinds of music as the one he does with Yurchenco. On broadcast radio. On Internet radio. Anywhere. And that's helped them grow an international audience. Thousands of people download the show every week.
ACT 4 (00:13)
We have listeners all over the world. We're pretty big in northern Europe and Japan. There's even a dozen people in some Chinese city called Shou Zheng that seem to listen. There's even somebody in Casablanca. And all over the United States.
NARR:
Henrietta Yurchenco has returned to broadcasting after a long hiatus. In the Nineteen Forties, she hosted and produced programs for WNYC. Now it is one of the largest public radio stations in the country. But back then, the station was owned by New York City. Smith says Yurchenco was a broadcasting pioneer.
ACT 5 (00:08):
She had, debatably, the first self-consciously folk and world music radio show. Ever.
NARR:
The station hired her as a piano accompanist. She'd spent several years at Yale, studying classical music. In her spare time, she worked tirelessly to put traditional music on the air. Yurchenco wandered the streets of New York, looking for fiddlers, guitarists, and singers, who would be willing to perform live, in studio.
Folklorist Robert Cantwell says that folklorists like Yurchenco were always trying to find the roots of traditional music.
ACT 6 (00:08):
That's part of what's going on here, is finding the sources of the music. It's a quest to find the wellhead.
NARR:
Yurchenco says that several important musicians had their New York radio debuts on her show. Pete Seeger…. Bob Dylan…. And Woody Guthrie.
She remembers her first meeting with the Dust Bowl ballad singer, in WNYC's studios.
ACT 7 (00:31):
I talk to Guthrie. "Say, would you sing a song even before the program goes on?" "Don't mind if I do." Well, he pushed a chair into the middle of the studio, put his foot up on it…. And begins to sing. Everybody in the studio moved back, to the periphery, sat down and listened to him, without a sound.
NARR:
Sixty-seven years ago, she produced a program, hosted by Lead Belly. Woody Guthrie was his guest.
SOUND (00:30):
Good afternoon, your Municipal station presents another in a series, "Folksongs of America," featuring that great Negro folksinger of Louisiana, Huddie Ledbetter, better known to you as Lead Belly. And Lead Belly has as his guest today, the dustiest dust bowler of them all, Woody Guthrie, of Oklahoma.
SOUND (00:30):
Well, you all know Woody Guthrie, and you all know John Hardy. John Hardy was a desperate little man, carried a gun and a razor every day, cut down a man on the West Virginny line, you ought to see John Hardy getting away. Ought to see John Hardy getting away.
NARR:
This is a rare recording. Yurchenco found it last year. For a long time, she figured that the disc was lost, like most other recordings of her shows. In fact, a former programming director at the station had taken it home from WNYC that day. It sat in his home collection until he passed away.
SOUND:
Henrietta, listening to Latin-American music.
NARR:
On a Thursday afternoon, Yurchenco sat in her bedroom, listening to South American music.
ACT 8 (00:08):
If you stayed here for the next two hours, you'd just hear one treasure after another….
NARR:
In the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, Henrietta Yurchenco taught ethnomusicology at City College. She lectured on traditional music, and she led singing groups. Yurchenco called one of them "Common Ground." They sang protest and anti-war songs.
ACT 9 (00:20):
So each semester we gave a concert, on one theme or another. Well, then I retired. And of course, the group broke up.
NARR:
Until last year, when a few of her former students came to her, to ask if she'd restart the group.
ACT 10 (00:07)
When the war began, I mean this one…. Can we start singing again? So we did.
NARR:
As the afternoon faded into evening, a handful of Yurchenco's former students arrived. They gathered around her kitchen table, and began to sing. Eli Smith recorded the sing-alongs for the "Down Home Radio Show."
SOUND:
From the sing-along
NARR:
For her former students, and for Eli, who is the youngest singer in the group, these weekly sing-alongs are important.
The music they sing, which was popular in the Nineteen Forties, and later, during the Vietnam War, in the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, still resonates with them. Eli Smith, like the other singers, wants people to hear it. He wants people to believe that they can change the world.
Even though he learned about the Sixties from his parents and from history textbooks, Smith looks to that decade, and to the music and art that fueled it, for inspiration.
ACT 11 (00:14):
You know, I'm waiting for the Sixties happen again. You know? I mean, not exactly, but it'd be nice. So we're getting it, we're getting it going, you know? We're trying to do everything I can; we're all tryiNARR:
Eli Smith and Henrietta Yurchenco met two years ago. (A mutual friend introduced them to each other). They've got a lot in common: They're both long-time New Yorkers. They have the same political views. They're staunch opponents of the War in Iraq. And they both love folk music.
Eli Smith is twenty-five. Henrietta Yurchenco is ninety-one.
Almost every week they host an Internet radio program together, broadcast from her bedroom, in Chelsea.
They call it "The Down Home Radio Show." They play string-band music from Appalachia. Country blues. Ballads from Mexico. And lately, protest songs.
SOUND:
The Down Home Radio Show (Nov. 4, 2006)
Well, Hello, Eli. "Hello, Henrietta." Listen, today we're going to do a program that will be run just about the time of the elections. "Yep." And we're urging everybody to go out and vote. Now we're going to deal with songs that have to do with the issues of our time. Like, for instance, principal of all: the war. "The war, yes. What, which war? What war?" Well, we're dealing with the Iraq War. "Oh yeah, that war. I almost forgot." The one, the quagmire that we're in right now. "Oh yeah, I heard about that…."
NARR:
Many of the songs they play come from Henrietta Yurchenco's personal collection. Since the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties, she has traveled the world, making field recordings of traditional music. She likes to call it "popular music." Literally: the music of the people.
Smith has his own name for the show.
ACT 1 (00:05):
I call it a hardcore, unreconstructed, paleo-acoustic folk-music program.
NARR:
Robert Cantwell teaches folklore at the University of North Carolina. He says that, for a long time, ever since the folk boom of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties ended, it was hard to hear, what he calls, old time music, like Yurchenco and Smith play on their program.
ACT 2 (00:04):
You really had to search high and low to find old-time music.
NARR:
He says that the Internet has made it easier to find rare, esoteric recordings.
ACT 3 (00:06):
You can get virtually any kind of music all the time anywhere.
NARR:
Eli Smith says that, even though more and more people have access to all sorts of music online, few shows that play as many different kinds of music as the one he does with Yurchenco. On broadcast radio. On Internet radio. Anywhere. And that's helped them grow an international audience. Thousands of people download the show every week.
ACT 4 (00:13)
We have listeners all over the world. We're pretty big in northern Europe and Japan. There's even a dozen people in some Chinese city called Shou Zheng that seem to listen. There's even somebody in Casablanca. And all over the United States.
NARR:
Henrietta Yurchenco has returned to broadcasting after a long hiatus. In the Nineteen Forties, she hosted and produced programs for WNYC. Now it is one of the largest public radio stations in the country. But back then, the station was owned by New York City. Smith says Yurchenco was a broadcasting pioneer.
ACT 5 (00:08):
She had, debatably, the first self-consciously folk and world music radio show. Ever.
NARR:
The station hired her as a piano accompanist. She'd spent several years at Yale, studying classical music. In her spare time, she worked tirelessly to put traditional music on the air. Yurchenco wandered the streets of New York, looking for fiddlers, guitarists, and singers, who would be willing to perform live, in studio.
Folklorist Robert Cantwell says that folklorists like Yurchenco were always trying to find the roots of traditional music.
ACT 6 (00:08):
That's part of what's going on here, is finding the sources of the music. It's a quest to find the wellhead.
NARR:
Yurchenco says that several important musicians had their New York radio debuts on her show. Pete Seeger…. Bob Dylan…. And Woody Guthrie.
She remembers her first meeting with the Dust Bowl ballad singer, in WNYC's studios.
ACT 7 (00:31):
I talk to Guthrie. "Say, would you sing a song even before the program goes on?" "Don't mind if I do." Well, he pushed a chair into the middle of the studio, put his foot up on it…. And begins to sing. Everybody in the studio moved back, to the periphery, sat down and listened to him, without a sound.
NARR:
Sixty-seven years ago, she produced a program, hosted by Lead Belly. Woody Guthrie was his guest.
SOUND (00:30):
Good afternoon, your Municipal station presents another in a series, "Folksongs of America," featuring that great Negro folksinger of Louisiana, Huddie Ledbetter, better known to you as Lead Belly. And Lead Belly has as his guest today, the dustiest dust bowler of them all, Woody Guthrie, of Oklahoma.
SOUND (00:30):
Well, you all know Woody Guthrie, and you all know John Hardy. John Hardy was a desperate little man, carried a gun and a razor every day, cut down a man on the West Virginny line, you ought to see John Hardy getting away. Ought to see John Hardy getting away.
NARR:
This is a rare recording. Yurchenco found it last year. For a long time, she figured that the disc was lost, like most other recordings of her shows. In fact, a former programming director at the station had taken it home from WNYC that day. It sat in his home collection until he passed away.
SOUND:
Henrietta, listening to Latin-American music.
NARR:
On a Thursday afternoon, Yurchenco sat in her bedroom, listening to South American music.
ACT 8 (00:08):
If you stayed here for the next two hours, you'd just hear one treasure after another….
NARR:
In the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, Henrietta Yurchenco taught ethnomusicology at City College. She lectured on traditional music, and she led singing groups. Yurchenco called one of them "Common Ground." They sang protest and anti-war songs.
ACT 9 (00:20):
So each semester we gave a concert, on one theme or another. Well, then I retired. And of course, the group broke up.
NARR:
Until last year, when a few of her former students came to her, to ask if she'd restart the group.
ACT 10 (00:07)
When the war began, I mean this one…. Can we start singing again? So we did.
NARR:
As the afternoon faded into evening, a handful of Yurchenco's former students arrived. They gathered around her kitchen table, and began to sing. Eli Smith recorded the sing-alongs for the "Down Home Radio Show."
SOUND:
From the sing-along
NARR:
For her former students, and for Eli, who is the youngest singer in the group, these weekly sing-alongs are important.
The music they sing, which was popular in the Nineteen Forties, and later, during the Vietnam War, in the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, still resonates with them. Eli Smith, like the other singers, wants people to hear it. He wants people to believe that they can change the world.
Even though he learned about the Sixties from his parents and from history textbooks, Smith looks to that decade, and to the music and art that fueled it, for inspiration.
ACT 11 (00:14):
You know, I'm waiting for the Sixties happen again. You know? I mean, not exactly, but it'd be nice. So we're getting it, we're getting it going, you know? We're trying to do everything I can; we're all trying to do everything we can…. So, hopefully something's gotta give.
NARR:
The sing-along ended promptly at eight. Everyone helped clean up the plates, the cups and saucers, and the lyric sheets that covered the kitchen table. The next podcast, featuring labor songs, and singing by Yurchenco and her former students, will be available online next week.
SOC:
David Gura, Columbia Radio News.
ng to do everything we can…. So, hopefully something's gotta give.
NARR:
The sing-along ended promptly at eight. Everyone helped clean up the plates, the cups and saucers, and the lyric sheets that covered the kitchen table. The next podcast, featuring labor songs, and singing by Yurchenco and her former students, will be available online next week.
SOC:
David Gura, Columbia Radio News.
SOC AT 7:30
MUSIC 'TIL 7:59