The Kitchen Sisters Present

In 1983 Prince hired LA sound technician Susan Rogers, one of the few women in the industry, to move to Minneapolis and help upgrade his home recording studio as he began work on the album and the movie Purple Rain. Susan, a trained technician with no sound engineering experience became the engineer of Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, and all that Prince recorded for the next four years.

For those four years, and almost every year after, Prince recorded at least a song a day and they worked together for 24 hours, 36 hours, 96 hours at a stretch, layering and perfecting his music and his hot funky sound.

In celebration of Prince’s birthday The Kitchen Sisters reprise “Prince & The Technician.”

An award winning professor of cognitive neuroscience and a legendary record producer, Susan Rogers has recently written a book, “This is What It Sounds Like," one of Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2022. It’s a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers — some of the best podcasts out there. Find out more at kitchensisters.org.

Chris was a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder called him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music of America, his adopted home after his family left Germany at the close of WWII. Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Rose Maddox, Flaco Jimenez… the list is long and mighty.

Chris Strachwitz was a keeper. His vault is jam-packed with 78s, 33s, 45s, reel-to-reels, cassettes, videos, photographs — an archive of all manner of recordings. And an avalanche of lifetime achievement awards — from the Grammy’s, The Blues Hall of Fame, The National Endowment for the Arts – for some 60 years of recording and preserving the musical cultural heritage of this nation through his label, Arhoolie Records.

In honor of Chris Strachwitz The Kitchen Sisters reprise The Passion of Chris Strachwitz, produced for The Goethe Institute’s Big Pond series. With interviews with Linda Ronstadt and Bonnie Raitt. Also featuring selected interviews done by Chris Strachwitz with Howlin’ Wolf and The Maddox Brothers and Rose.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, mixed by Jim McKee.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia network from PRX.

Ada Louise Huxtable, who “invented” the profession of architecture critic, wrote countless articles for two great daily newspapers and had a gigantic influence on our understanding of the work of architects, real estate developers, city bureaucrats, and the city itself, over the course of six decades in print.

Beginning in 1963, Huxtable was the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper. In 1970, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. With her impeccable civic values, cultivated aesthetic sensibility and lacerating accuracy, Ada Louise Huxtable, praised and razed.

Huxtable, who was born and lived her life in New York City, raised the public’s awareness of architecture and the urban environment. She wrote for the New York Times and later for the Wall Street Journal. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.

Produced by Brandi Howell for the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation’s podcast, New Angle Voice.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson), with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. It is part of the Radiotopia Network from PRX.

Cab drivers, children’s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century.

In honor of Tony Schwartz’s Centennial, The Kitchen Sisters Present an audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound.

It was 1947 when Tony first stepped out of his apartment in midtown Manhattan with his microphone to capture the sound of his neighborhood. He was a pioneer recordist, experimenting with microphones and jury-rigging tape recorders to make them portable (some of these recordings were first published by Folkways Records). His work creating advertising and political TV and radio commercials is legendary.

The Kitchen Sisters visited Tony in his midtown basement studio in 1999. He had just finished teaching a media class at Harvard by telephone — Tony was agoraphobic and hardly ever ventured beyond his postal zone. He was there in his studio surrounded by reel to reel tape recorders, mixing consoles, framed photographs and awards — and row upon row of audio tapes in carefully labeled boxes.

Tony passed away in 2008. His collection now resides in the Library of congress — 90.5 linear feet, 230 boxes, 76,345 items — some 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialects from his surrounding neighborhood and 46 countries around the world.

Tony’s Centennial is being celebrated on April 27, 2023, at the Library of Congress, as part of the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference—A Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal.

This story is part of the Lost & Found Sound series produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Jay Allison and NPR. Special thanks to The National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanities.

For some eight years now thirty-four Black women have gathered monthly around a big dining room table in the orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA—meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing—grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls that are overwhelming their community.

Spearheaded by dancer/choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith and theater director Ellen Sebastian Chang, this House/Full of Black Women—artists, scholars, healers, nurses, midwives, an ice cream maker, a donut maker, an architect, a theater director, a choreographer, sex trafficking abolitionists and survivors—have come together to creatively address and bring their mission and visions to the streets. Over the years they have created performances, rituals, pop-up processions in the storefronts, galleries, warehouses, museums and streets of Oakland.

This hour-long special features sound-rich “episodes” of performances and rituals, interviews with sex trafficking abolitionists, personal stories of growing up in the Bay Area, music, Black women dreaming, resisting, insisting.

Produced by Ellen Sebastian Chang, Sital Muktari and The Kitchen Sisters, narrated by Sital Muktari, mixed by Jim McKee, in collaboration with an evolving House/Full of Black Women collective, Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell.

Funding for this House/Full of Black Women Special comes from The Creative Work Fund, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Kaleta Doolin Foundation, The Texas Women’s Foundation, Susan Sillins, listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions, and PRX.

Original funding for House/Full of BlackWomen was provided by Creative Capital, Creative Work Fund, The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, MAP Fund, and the Hewlett 50.

House/Full of Black Women is part of The Keepers series produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton and mixed by Jim McKee. Archival sounds, recordings and compositions by Alexa Burrell. Visuals created by photographer Robbie Sweeney and designer Kevin Clarke. Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson created some of the soundscape. For names of all the many House/Full members who have had a hand in this project visit deepwatersdance.com.

Many know Ray Eames as the small, dirndled woman behind her more famous husband, Charles Eames. But Ray was the industrial designer bending plywood in the spare bedroom, a talented artist who saw the world full of color, the visionary who treated folk art, cigarette wrappers, flowers, and toys as equally valuable and inspiring. Ray brought the sparkle and inspiration to the legendary Eames Office.

The Kitchen Sisters Present Ray Eames from the New Angle Voice a podcast of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, produced by Brandi Howell.

Editorial advising from Alexandra Lange. Thanks also to Virginia Eskridge, and Amy Auscherman, Director of Archives and Brand Heritage for MillerKnoll. The archival audio heard in this episode comes from the MillerKnoll archives and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Intro music composed by Emma Jackson. Special thanks to Pat Kirkham, Lucia Dewey Atwood, Llisa Demetrios, Jeannine Oppewall, Donald Albrecht, Meg McAleer and Tracey Barton at the Library of Congress, and Alexandra Lange.

Funding for this podcast comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, and MillerKnoll.

Funding for The Kitchen Sisters comes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Susan Sillins Foundation, and contributors to The Kitchen Sisters non profit productions.

In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois, scholar, public intellectual, and social and political activist, published his magnum opus: Black Reconstruction in America. In it, he tackled the subject of the American Civil War and, especially, the decade or so that followed, a period known as Reconstruction.

During Reconstruction it seemed, for a time, that the South and the United States as a whole, might be remade as a radically more equitable society. What was achieved during Reconstruction and why these efforts ultimately failed, is what concerns Du Bois in Black Reconstruction. He was also concerned with challenging and correcting the racist histories of Reconstruction that were prevalent in both popular and academic circles in his day.

Black Reconstruction is a widely respected and celebrated book today, but many of its early readers were dismissive, perhaps none more than the academic historians who Du Bois was justifiably calling out. The American Historical Review, for its part, ignored the book entirely. No review. Well, until now. Almost a century later, the AHR just published a review of Black Reconstruction in the December 2022 issue, penned by Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton.

Professor Elizabeth Hinton serves as our guide exploring W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction. We also hear from Eric Foner, Chad Williams, Sue Mobley, and Kendra Field.

Produced by History in Focus, a podcast from The American Historical Review, hosted and produced by Daniel Story, Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC Santa Cruz.

Voices in this Episode

In the early 1980s, Black students and the African American community at American University had been demonstrating for more access and inclusion in the university’s community services. One of the demands was for four hours of time every Saturday on Radio station WAMU, the campus station. This demand was met and suddenly Black students and the community were pouring into the station on Saturdays to make radio, to learn the craft, to be heard. Judi Moore Smith heard the call and soon was producing 10 minutes every week during that four-hour Saturday slot.

Someone heard one of Judi’s pieces and urged her to apply for funding. She was already going to Union Temple Baptist Church in Anacostia near Washington DC, mesmerized by the preaching of Rev. Willie Wilson. She began to cross the country interviewing preachers and ministers, capturing their speaking styles, their preaching styles, listening, watching, realizing these were not only religious men delivering weekly sermons—these were performing artists.

Judi lit the path with this piece and the creation of a deep archive of Black history and creative expression. It is one of the projects that has inspired us over the years—the spirit, the stylizing, the swagger, the soul, the poetry—and the music. Judi asked one of the preachers, Reverend Robert Pruitt, to do the narration for the piece and gathered a kind of congregation in the studio with him to enact call and response.

Davia reached out to Judi this year to see if she had a copy of the piece. It was created in the days way before the internet and the archiving of everything. Luckily we found a cassette of it at the Pacifica Archives.

Special Thanks to Judi Moore Latta for all her pioneering radio documentary work especially about Black culture, history and expression and her decades of teaching and working with hundreds of young people across the years. And thanks to Pacifica Archive.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton.

The Kitchen Sisters receive support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and from generous contributors to The Kitchen Sisters nonprofit Productions.

We’re part of PRX’s Radiotopia – a network of independently created and owned podcasts – some of the best stories out there.

Criticisms of fast food often focus on the industrialized system that produces the burgers, buns and fries, or the food’s negative health impacts. Some criticisms have noted the deep ties between McDonald’s and the Black community, blaming communities of color for bad choices, sometimes blaming the fast food industry for being predatory with its advertising or store locations. But the relationship between fast food and Black America is way more complicated.

Jerusha Klemperer, host of the podcast “What You’re Eating” talks with Dr. Marcia Chatelain about her Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America,” and the history of that complicated relationship.

This story was produced for “What You’re Eating” by Nathan Dalton and FoodPrint.org. We thank them for sharing it with The Kitchen Sisters Present.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We are part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers who own their own work.

Support for The Kitchen Sisters comes from The National Endowment for the Arts and supporters of The Kitchen Sisters Productions non profit.

In 2015 we presented this story about Curtis Carroll, the Stock Market Wizard of San Quentin. Everyone in San Quentin called him Wall Street. He was teaching his fellow prisoners about stocks and had become an informal financial adviser to fellow inmates and correctional officers.

After serving 27 years of a 54 years to life sentence in prison, Curtis Carroll, has been released on parole. We hear his story and talk to him about what’s next.

When Wall Street was put in prison almost three decades ago he couldn’t read or write. One day he stumbled on the financial section of the newspaper thinking it was the sports section, which his cellmate used to read to him. An inmate asked him if he played the stocks.

“I had never heard the word before,” Wall Street said. “He explained to me how it works and said, ‘This is where white people keep their money.’ When he said that I said, ‘Whoa, I think I stumbled across something here.’ ”

Wall Street taught himself how to read and write beginning with candy wrappers and clothing logos. He pored over financial news: the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes.

On the inside, Wall Street didn’t have access to a computer or the Internet, so he called his family members to check the closing prices for the day and told them what to buy. He says business is like a soap opera — he’s always trying to anticipate what will happen next. “I like to know what the CEO’s doing. I like to know who’s in trouble.”

“I’m in prison, but I’m on just the same playing field as Warren Buffett,” Carroll says. “I can pick the exact same companies. I can’t buy as many shares, but technically we’re just the same.”

You can find out more about Wall Street, his life and Financial Empowerment, Emotional Literacy Project at ProjectFeel.org. He’s also on Instagram (@CurtisWallstreetCarroll) and Youtube (@WallStreetCarroll).

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Wall Street’s original story was mixed by Jim McKee at Earwax Studios. We are part of PRX’s Radiotopia Network.

This episode was produced in collaboration with Nancy Mullane and Life of the Law. Many thanks!

Special thanks to Curtis Carroll, San Quentin Financial Literacy Program, Anna Deavere Smith, Arnold Perkins, Troy Williams, Lt. Sam Robinson, Tom DeMartini, Zach Williams, Clarence Long, James Fox and the Prison Yoga Project, Tracy Wahl, Jacob Conrad, Nigel Poor, TED, Pop-Up Magazine, and NPR.

The Kitchen Sisters are supported by NEA and contributions to the non-profit Kitchen Sisters Productions.