Deeper Roots Radio

It’s a 1950 heatwave of rhythm and blues sounds this morning on Deeper Roots. We’ll move away from anything that might be polite or polished and turn our attention to the sweat-soaked, neon-lit world of rhythm and blues, a sound that was the early morning thunder and lightning just ahead of the dawn of rock ‘n roll. We’re focusing on the year 1950 where jump blues started to grow teeth --- where the saxophones were honking, the backbeats hitting harder, and indie labels from Memphis to LA were capturing lightning in a bottle. From the smoky corners of the Delta to the high voltage clubs of the North, we’re digging deep into the crates for the some pounding rhythms from Dave Bartholomew, Julia Lee, Bull Moose Jackson, Jimmy McCracklin as well as Buddy and Ella Johnson…oh, and some Tiny Bradshaw’s Breaking Up The House. As Chuck Berry pointed out: “…it's got a backbeat, you can't lose it, any old time you use it”.

Get ready for a deep dive into the last 100 years of America’s musical DNA. This week’s Deeper Roots is a ‘romp’ in the truest sense—a free form show celebrating the winsome, the lonesome, and everything in between. We’ve got a heavy-hitting lineup including Etta James, Jimmie Davis, and Billie Holiday, spanning the full spectrum of gospel, country, blues, and jazz. Dave’s been digging through the “digital crates” of the past century to bring you two hours of essential, sometimes irreverent, always authentic sounds. Whether the selections are wholesome or a bit rowdy, this episode runs the full gamut of the American songbook. Pull up a chair at the Deeper Roots dining hall this Friday morning on KOWS Community Radio—there is plenty of soul to go around.

This week’s show peels back the velvet curtain of the Golden Age of Country music and introduces some lower chart shed shakers from the outskirts of Nashville. While the charts were full of polished crooners and weeping violins, there was a different sound brewing in and around the perimeter—a raw, frantic energy that didn’t belong in a ballroom. These are the tracks that blurred the line between the honky-tonk and the garage. We’ll deliver the distorted side of that golden age with some familiar names (Buck Owens, Jerry Reed, Johnny Bond) and some of those who were lost to those dusty Ernest Tubb Record Shop dollar bins (Eddie Zack, Jimmy Swan, Benny Barnes), all  in a package meant to get those fingers poppin’. Hope you can join us for some gritty, low-fi country vibes.

Nat King Cole's transition from a respected jazz pianist to a mainstream icon was a perfect storm of technical brilliance, a groundbreaking vocal style, and a persona that radiated "suave sophistication." While jazz purists sometimes lamented his move toward pop, it was his ability to blend jazz's complexity with pop's accessibility that made him a household name. He delivered hit after hit with a penchant for candidates (or entries from) the Great American Songbook. With this in mind, we’ll take this week’s show in an direction that honors the songs he became most famous for…from Bobby Troup’s Route 66 to Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life…covered by others including some rocking tributes, some ballads in the style of country and bluesy soul numbers from Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke. We don’t stop there.  Join Dave Stroud for another celebration from a hundred years of America’s music 

This week’s episode finds the heart of rock ‘n roll; that recipe of a rhythm and blues with just the right pinch of just about everything else. Chuck Berry’s legacy stands as one of the most important stories in rock ‘n roll’s 75 or so years. His music, particularly in those early years, was covered ad nauseum but it was always done best in an artist’s own voice. Why? Because the music speaks for itself. We’ll share music from Sleepy Labeef to Nina Simone, Linda Ronstadt to Peter Gammons (!), and Conway Twitty to the late, great John Hammond. Covers include You Never Can Tell, Sweet Little Sixteen, Nadine, and No Money down with another dozen, all honoring the King (or is it the Prime Minister) of Rock ‘n Roll whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year. 

We’re going to take another journey through those dusty, neon-lit archives of Western swing, a genre that famously thumbed its nose at musical boundaries. While the “King” Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys rightly claim the throne, the true soul of the movement lives in the smaller, rowdier units that blurred the lines between Appalachian fiddling, big band jazz, and low-down blues. For our listeners, we’re looking past the “San Antonio Rose” to the grit of the lower Great Plains. We’ll be digging into the deep-cut recordings that highlight the genre’s technical audacity, exploring a sound that kept the dance halls jumping through the Depression proving that Western swing was always much more than just “hillbilly jazz”—it was a revolution you could dance to.

 It’s a free form morning as Dave once again digs out some favorites and some deep tracks from the last century of America’s music. He’ll be paying his respects to Doug Sahm’s keyboard master, Augie Meyers, while at the same time picking on some thematic tones, including that of heaven, an early century legend by the name of Lulu, early rhythm and western from 1950 as well as a collection of soul tracks that glistened in the winds from 1967. Tune in for The Ink Spots, Jimmy Newman, John Prine, The Castaleers and Fats Waller…a sampler from the past one hundred years. Free form mornings here on KOWS occur only once in a blue moon so you’ll want to be tuning in for more music discovery from all genre corners. You're invited to come on up to the house where we’re ready, willing and waiting to entertain, putting the madness of a wannabe king behind you for a two-hour joyful jaunt where you'll find three chords and the truth. 

This week we celebrate Women’s History Month the way we know best — by following the music. For more than a century, women have shaped the sound of America’s story. They didn’t just sing the songs — they wrote them, bent them, electrified them, sanctified them, and sometimes had to fight just to be heard over them. From the tent shows and juke joints of the 1920s to arena stages and global spotlights, women have carried rhythm, blues, gospel, country, rock, pop — and the truth — on their shoulders. Tune in this coming Friday morning for a journey that begins at the foundation. Before rock and roll. Before crossover radio. When the blues was still carving its name into shellac and history. We’ll then make our way into the genres of jazz, country, rock, and gospel where women’ influenced the deeper roots of American music and you find their fingerprints everywhere — in the blues phrasing, in the gospel shout, in the country confession, in the pop hook, in the rock-and-roll roar.

Join Dave Stroud for a look at a fascinating, if somewhat cringey, slice of music history, where white cover versions of black R&B nuggets were whitewashed across the pop charts in the 1950s. While the ‘cover version’ was a standard industry practice, so were the ‘sanitized’ versions of R&B hits by black artists that made them more ‘palatable’ for white radio audiences, spotlighting white artists while the original creators stayed in the shadows. It’s certainly something that could be the topic of numerous Deeper Roots episodes but we’ll limit our scope to a two hour exploration, measuring the original against the cover. On one side of the house we’ll hear from Fats Domino (a popular source for the practic), Big Joe Turner, The Moonglows and a handful of others. The other side of the house has the names of Pat Boone, Art Mooney, The Fontane Sisters and others among the dubious roster ‘favorites’. Radio and media helped to democratize the landscape but today’s parallels with the frothing ‘look over thereness’ of right wing hate is unmistakable and hard to ignore. It was George Santayana who observed that “those who do not learn from history, are bound to repeat it.“

Blue and cool is the mood as we spin the dial back to the 1950s — a decade of chrome, tailfins, Cold War tension, Beat poetry, and late-night cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling of a dimly lit club. Beneath the middle class culture of the day, there was a restless heartbeat of jazz. This was the era when bebop matured into cool, hard bop caught fire, and modal explorations began reshaping the language of improvisation. Artists like Miles Davis refined understatement into revolution, John Coltrane stretched harmony toward spiritual searching, Thelonious Monk bent notes and expectations alike, and Ella Fitzgerald turned the human voice into a virtuosic instrument. Jazz in the ’50s wasn’t background music — it was conversation, protest, poetry, and possibility. Dave’s selected some important landmarks and deep tracks that take you into those dusty digital bins of jazz and improvisation this morning on Deeper Roots.