Deeper Roots Radio

Episode 13: Swingin' Out West

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.

Episode 12: Heavenly Day

 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. 

Episode 11: Women's History Month

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.

Episode 10: The Hijacked Jukebox

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.“

Episode 9: Mid-Century Modern Jazz

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.