Radio! Mail! Holiday giving & getting!

A quick advertisement, invitation, & pitch:

Since 2012, I’ve hosted The Lost Child radio show, a weekly hour of traditional, classic, historic, & downhome roots musics, spotlighting a wide range of sounds: old-time string-bands, rhythm & blues, field hollers, rockabilly, gospel, southern soul, & more.

In 2021, I’d like to invite you to support The Lost Child by becoming a Friend of the show. Every month for 12 months, you’ll receive something cool in the mail, including Lost Child art prints and original booklets / zines like the one below, featuring music history, writing, research, artifacts, & drawings. Here’s a glimpse of January’s gift to The Lost Child’s Friends: “Bright Glory: Voices of Sumter County, Alabama,” a tribute to the historic community of powerful singers from that region.

For more information, and to sign up, please visit The Lost Child’s new Patreon page. (You can also knock out some holiday shopping by giving a 12-month subscription to a friend or family member.) Please know that your contribution will directly support original, creative, fiercely local radio, helping cover the cost of bringing new(/old) music and research to the airwaves each week. I can’t thank you enough for your support, but I’ll try: it’ll be a good year of radio, and I’ll be working hard to make these monthly mailings something meaningful and unique.

By the way / while I’m here — I apologize that it’s been such a slow year on this blog, with very occasional posts. Most of my writing time this year has been devoted to wrapping up my book, and the website has gone largely neglected. But hopefully there will be some good / big / long-awaited news on the book front in a few months — so stay tuned.

(When I say “long-awaited,” by the way, I really mean by me: this spring will mark ten years since I started writing this thing.)

In the meantime, here’s another piece of good news, and another worthy cause to support: a beloved magazine, The Old-Time Herald, has just launched its shiny new digital platform online. My (long!) story on the music of Alabama Governor “Big” Jim Folsom — a story which began with short posts on this blog, then led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, and finally appeared in full in The Old-Time Herald‘s print edition, last winter — is available to subscribers on the new site. There are several subscription options, both for the print and online versions; you can access the full site for as little as $15 a year, which is a genuine steal. The Folsom story is my own favorite thing I’ve written in a while, and I’m grateful to the OTH for allowing writers like me the space to tell complex, unlikely stories like this one.

That’s all for now. Once more, here’s the link for supporting The Lost Child; many thanks for considering. Until next time, keep yourself healthy, stay safe, and be kind. Happy holiday season to you.

A New Zine! (Get It!)

Here’s something!

For next Saturday’s radio show, I created an exclusive illustrated playlist, in the form of a full-color, 16-page, pocket-sized zine. I decided not to announce the song titles and artists on air as I play them next week, but instead to make available this little guide you can use to follow along at home.

The best part: all this can be yours(!!) for a donation of $5 or more to The Lost Child.

Just shoot five bucks, via PayPal, to burgin@bhammountainradio.com. Or, if you like, email me at that address for other payment options. I’ll get it in the mail to you ASAP. Your $5 covers the cost of printing and shipping and handling; any dollars over those first five will be considered a generous donation to this radio show and will help support further endeavors like this.

If you use PayPal, be sure to include your name and address in the notes.

The illustrated show began as a playlist of unaccompanied ballad singing and other sorts of a cappella song; but I started breaking it up with a few soft instrumental ditties and other odds and ends to mix up the flow of things. One highlight: a Galician immigrant to the U. S. — a badchen, or wedding entertainer, recorded in the 1950s by folklorist Ruth Rubin — performs a series of wedding tunes on the fiddle, songs he’d brought with him from the old country. And a Polish immigrant to the states, also recorded by Rubin, sings a beautiful, wordless Chassidic tune. Another favorite moment in the mix: a Puerto Rican immigrant to New York, recorded by Tony Schwartz in the ’50s, translates into English the lyrics of a jukebox lament — a record about the Puerto Rican experience in New York, no less — while the song plays in the background. There’s also preaching by Brother Claude Ely, hokum by Peg Leg Bates, and a lonesome field holler by Livingston, Alabama’s Annie Grace Horn Downson. Plus ballads, spirituals, and lullabies from North Carolina, Alabama, West Virginia, Tennessee, and more. And for just five dollars American, it’s all illustrated and annotated for your own eyes and ears.

(To hear the show, tune in Saturday, November 17, to Birmingham Mountain Radio, from 9 to 10 a.m. (Central). It will rebroadcast Tuesday, November 20, from eleven to midnight. You can listen in Birmingham at 107.3 FM or stream it online anywhere at www.bhammountainradio.com. After that, I’ll post it on The Lost Child’s Mixcloud site, where you can stream it anytime.)

Before I sign off for today, here’s a little tribute I just made to the Delmore Brothers, Alton and Rabon, for my ongoing “Book of Ancestors.”

The Delmores had a great signature tune called “The Brown’s Ferry Blues,” which included such lyrics as this — “Hard luck poppa, counting his toes, you can smell his feet wherever he goes” — and which also offered this sad testimony: “Early to bed and early to rise, and your girl goes out with other guys … If you don’t believe me try it yourself; I tried it, and I got left.” The Delmores were born to a family of tenant farmers in Elkmont, Alabama, and they grew up to pioneer first a trendsetting style of soft country vocal harmonies and then a rollicking brand of amplified “hillbilly boogie” guitar. They spent their youths down the road from Brown’s Ferry, Alabama, and as members of the Grand Ole Opry they formed the Brown’s Ferry Four with country superstars Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones. Today the spot their music memorialized is home to the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Power Point.

Someone should write a song about that.

Thanks for following along with this blog. See you next time.

Girl Scouts, Lost Heroes, & the Soul of Man

One Saturday last April my radio show was visited by a troupe of Girl Scouts; they were working on their music badges, and one of the moms (my friend Marnie) asked me to talk to them about radio and share a little music history. I decided to focus on some of the Alabama music that I play on the show, and as a kind of handout I made them a little zine they could take home: “The Girl Scouts’ Guide to Alabama Music Heroes, Volume 1.”

The girls and their moms and a few dads came, and we talked about Alabama music and zines and radio. I recorded them singing a couple of songs, one of which I played over the airwaves a week later. “Make new friends,” the girls sang, “but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.” After the show, the troupe went on to make new friends at Seasick Records for Record Store Day, in further pursuit of their music badges.

Troupe 30672 visits The Lost Child radio show, 2017

Originally there only existed about a dozen copies of the zine, and each was the property of a Girl Scout. But last month, for the opening of an art / history / photo show I put together at Crestwood Coffee, I decided to make some more copies for the general public, giving the zine its worldwide, non-Scout debut. If you want one, you can pick up a copy at the coffeeshop or at The Jaybird in Birmingham, or you can email me for one (burgin@bhammountainradio.com). They’re $3 each (plus shipping), or just $1 for Girl Scouts.

The show on the coffeeshop walls, both its content and design, was actually inspired by the original Girl Scout zine. “What is the Soul of Man?: The Roots of Alabama Music” highlights many of the state’s music heroes and traditions, with historic photos and original text. Included are more than a few forgotten heroes a handful of legends, all of whom made substantial marks on their musical communities and culture. It’s a history that incorporates jazz pioneers, old-time fiddlers, blues women, country brother duets, civil rights foot soldiers, rural singers, rock-and-roll harbingers, and more. The show is only up for another couple of days, through Tuesday, March 6, so I invite you to come out to the coffeeshop before it closes and check it out.

After I take this down I think I’ll continue expanding it for some other location. There are a few segments I meant to get to before it went up, but never did — Muscle Shoals soul, Sacred Harp singing, Gennett Records’ 1927 Birmingham sessions, and so on — so hopefully there’ll be more to come, somewhere down the line.

In the meantime, come check out the current installation while you can. Hopefully you’ll find some history there that’s news to you.