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What if something was thought to be gone forever? Would you still go looking for it? There is a man named David Benscoter , who does just this. Benscoter spends a lot if his time exploring an area of Eastern Washington known as the Palouse. He searches abandoned homesteads, looking for varieties of apples that are believed to be extinct. “These trees, they’re just going to go away someday. And if I don’t do it there’s no one who’s going to search for them,” says Benscoter. It turns out, some of

To say that Seattle musician Lydia Ramsey was raised in a musical family would be kind of an understatement. “Me and my brothers joke that, like, in order to sit down in our living room, you had to pick up an instrument because it was taking up the chair. And then you’d be like oh, well I’m holding this so I might as well play something on it,” said Ramsey. Eventually, Lydia would decide to dig a little deeper into her family history. What she found out is that music has been woven through her

On July 3, 2017, KNKX took its live broadcast of All Things Considered to the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle, on the eve of their centennial. We told stories about the locks' creation, its present impact on the region, and its future. This audio is a sampler of the three-hour broadcast. You can also listen individually to each of the stories we did that day.

Shortly after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, Laura Cancel found herself at a volunteer meeting at Amazon, where she works in the regulatory and litigation department. Everyone at the meeting was trying to figure out how to send supplies to people on the island. When someone mentioned she had used Amazon’s wish list feature to keep track of items her family needed, Cancel had an idea.

This week on Sound Effect, our theme is "the beat goes on." We open with Karen Sakata, who has been running karaoke at Bush Garden for decades. Hip-hop artist Draze talks about about how his Seattle and Zimbabwean roots influence his music. Jennifer Wing heads to Bellingham to hear a band made up of musicians with developmental disabilities . We learn about a publicity stunt that involved dropping a piano from a helicopter. Ariel Van Cleave heads to Central Washington University to experience

In some parts of the world, music isn’t a hobby or even just a form of art -- it’s the stuff that connects the culture. And that’s the environment musician Dumisani Maraire Jr. was raised in. “I like to say in our family, it’s not like ‘are you going to perform?’ You just are going to perform. Literally, it’s just a part of who we are and what we do,” said Maraire. Maraire, better known as Draze, was born in Seattle but his roots lead directly to Zimbabwe. His father came from Zimbabwe in 1968,

Andre Sanabria discovered at 21 he had a deadly disease, and the only cure was a double-lung transplant. But that did not stop him from making music. In fact, he says music is what was keeping him alive. Fearing the risks of an operation, and facing his declining health, he instead focused his time and energy on composing, performing and touring even when he could barely hold a guitar. And this was not quiet music, but metal-tinged hardcore punk. And Sanabria would sometimes sing (or scream)

There is a Northwest band that’s been around for 17 years, called Out Of The Ashes. There are about 30 members. They play covers of The Beatles, Elvis, Tom Petty, and other popular artists. One of the things that sets this band apart is that to be a member, you have to have a developmental disability such as Autism or Down Syndrome. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, 34 year-old Thomas John Meyer is standing on the shiny, hardwood dance floor of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall in Bellingham, Wash,

In 1968, in the town of Duvall, Washington, a piano was dropped from a helicopter in front of about 3,000 people. One of the few people who can explain how and, more importantly, why something like this happened is Paul Dorpat. The founder and editor of the Seattle counter-culture magazine Helix, Dorpat was one of the people that helped pull off an event that even he calls absurd. But what’s even more absurd is how this event, in a roundabout way, helped inspire a certain other generation

It’s hard to imagine a time when karaoke did not exist in the Northwest. Today, any night of the week, you can go out with friends and find some place where you can belt out your favorite tunes in front of a crowd. But, everything has a beginning. Things have to start somewhere, right? For American style karaoke in the Northwest, it was at Bush Garden in Seattle’s International District. “When we first started out, people were a little bit shy, they didn’t want to act like they could sing. There