Back to the Country Goes Back to School 9/11/24 WORT 89.9FM

Howdy Friends, tomorrow morning I'll be hosting Back to the Country on WORT FM 89.9FM from 9am-noon. It's our fall pledge and the theme is a Back to School country music salute to NCAA Athletics.

Back in 1981, Bobby Harden of the Harden Trio fame, went to the Starday Sound Studios in Nashville, TN and recorded more than 40 school-specific albums for All-Pro Records. Longtime Starday engineer Tommy Hill produced the records and NAPA Auto Parts stores handled the regional distribution. Each album included songs about the school’s winning sports programs, their specific coaches, division rivals, upcoming football schedules, and usually a song about the cheerleaders, too. As you might guess, they recycled a whole bunch of the backing tracks with slightly altered lyrics, many of which I find hilarious!

I’ve got close to a dozen of these, including odes to my alma mater Indiana University and my current employer UW-Madison, and tomorrow morning, as I attempt to raise money for WORT’s fall pledge drive, I’ll play for you some of my favorites! Streaming via wortfm.org

New Semester at UW-Madison and Mead Witter School of Music

I'm both super excited and a little bit terrified, but a new semester at UW-Madison begins today and in a few minutes I'll be teaching Intro to Music Cultures of the World.

Back in grad school I took a course from Dr. Mellonee Burnim (UW alum) called Systems of Meaning, which was basically training for how to teach Intro to Ethnomusicology. I wasn't sure if I'd ever have that opportunity, but here we are roughly a decade later and I'm super grateful to have this opportunity.

Many thanks to Dr. Burnim for all the prep, to Dr. Nadia Chana for recommending I take over her class, to the Mead Witter School of Music for letting me design my own course, to the UW-Madison Libraries for letting me take on the overload, to my three fantastic TAs who will be doing all the grading, to all the amazing guest speakers who have committed to join us, and to the nearly 300 students who are already enrolled. AV passcode, check. Mic check. Let's go!