If you are looking for fame and fortune traditional music probably isn’t the best subject to write about but as weblogs go Back Porch News is modestly successful. It has about 172 subscribers and and gets about 1900 page views a month. It makes a tiny amount of advertising revenue. It could bring in more if properly handled but we are talking about folk music.

However if you love folk music and want to share that love with other people AND you want to help the community grow and prosper this could be your chance.

The price depends, frankly on who you are and what you want to do with the site. For a strictly commercial sale I’d be looking for about $2,500. For someone with the right plans for the site it could be considerably less. If you think you might be interested use the contact form to get in touch with me.

-Ken

Dear Friends,

I am very sorry to report that Henrietta Yurchenco, my friend and co-creator of Down Home Radio, died on the morning of Monday Dec. 10th at the age of 91. Although she had not been feeling well for some time, her death was never-the-less sudden and shocking. She was an extraordinary person, incredibly full of life, energy and love for people and for music. Henrietta leaves behind untold numbers of friends, devoted students and people who she influenced in any number of ways. The value of her work documenting and promoting the indigenous cultures of Mexico, the United States and many other parts of the world is extraordinary.

The Down Home Radio project was not Henrietta’s first time around with radio, it was more like her fourth or fifth, and yet she approached it with all the zeal of someone a quarter her age. Henrietta started her radio career in early 1940 as a producer at WNYC here in New York. She produced a series of programs featuring American folk music and music from around the world, and was also the producer of Leadbelly’s radio program. She worked closely with Leadbelly preparing the scripts for the show and doing whatever else producers do! She arranged for Pete Seeger’s first radio appearance as well as Woody Guthrie’s first radio appearance in New York. It was not easy to find foreign ethnic bands at that time or even to get recordings, so in order to get talent for her world music radio shows she would hit the streets, casing ethnic community houses and restaurants, union halls and other places to find musicians to put on the air. Henrietta was back on the air for a short time in the late 50’s on WBAI, and then for almost all of the 1960’s on WNYC where she did a show called “Adventures in Folk Music.” On this program she did the first, or one of the first, radio interviews with Bob Dylan. Name almost any folk musician (and many “non-folk” musicians and other artists) of the last 60 years and Henrietta had them on a radio show at one time or another. That or they came to one of her famous parties, or appeared at a concert she produced or all of the above.

Over the years Henrietta worked with many other folklorists and ethnomusicologists including Alan Lomax and Charles Seeger (Pete’s father), a very important musicologist who needs to be rediscovered by people today. Henrietta often liked to repeat a quote by Charles Seeger, something she heard him say at a Society for Ethnomusicology conference in the 1970’s- “Studying the music is fine, but never forget the people.” By this she meant to remind me, other field workers and anyone else who would listen that song is a fundamentally human expression and should not be divorced from the actual lives of the people making it. She recognized that most music studied by enthnomusicologists and folklorists is produced by oppressed classes of people, minorities and indigenous tribes who live in poverty either in rural areas or in city slums, and that the condition of their lives should not be glossed over in the study of their music.

In 1941 Henrietta, her husband Boris Yurchenco and some friends took a huge road trip from New York City to Mexico City. There was a great cultural scene going on there at that time, with artists doing all kinds of things, as well as other outlandish pursuits such as the brand new possibility of field recording. Henrietta had experience in radio and knew the right people, and so she was asked by Mexico’s Institute of Anthropology to start going into the most rural areas to record. Henrietta was in the right place at the right time and seized the opportunity. She told me that when the man offered her the chance to go into the field and record she “nearly bit his hand.” She was very excited. Accompanied by photographer Augustin Maya and a native guide, Henrietta ended up lugging 300 pounds of recording equipment through the Sierra Mountains of Mexico on a mule. They slept on the ground, braved scorpions and other dangers and found people and music unknown to outsiders or thought to have been lost for hundreds of years.

Henrietta Yurchenco with Augustin Maya and Mexican Indians 1944

All of these things I’ve been describing were very outside of the bounds proscribed for women at that time. But Henrietta never gave that sort of thing any regard and advocated strongly for women’s rights in all of her work throughout the years. Henrietta’s field work among the Indian and Mestizo population of Mexico continued in earnest up through recent years. She also conducted field work in Guatemala, Columbia, Ecuador, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Johns Island South Carolina, Spain and Morocco.

In 1966 Henrietta began teaching Ethnomusicology at City College in New York. She was vigorously opposed to academic pretense and bureaucratic nonsense and gave straight talking and by all accounts very inspiring courses. I wish I could have taken those! She had workshops on how to play many different instruments and styles of music and produced many concerts at City College. Henrietta was always very politically minded and active starting way back in the 30’s, and at City College was very involved in the Anti-Vietnam-War Movement. She remained politically active, going to demonstrations, speaking out against war and oppression, singing and promoting protest and peace songs until the end of her life. She retired from City College in 1987 at the age of 70 as Professor Emerita, but the Ethnomusicology classes would always visit her at her home every semester to meet the ever friendly and inspiring matriarch.

I met Henrietta when she was 89. Although I knew her for a much shorter time than virtually all of her other friends, we became close, worked together a great deal, and she had a profound impact on me. I had read her autobiography “Around the World in 80 Years” while living in California, loved the book and was introduced to her by a mutual friend shortly after I moved back to New York in 2005. We hit it off immediately, and shortly there after I asked her to host Down Home Radio with me. To my delight she was way into the idea of doing an internet radio show and building something from the ground up. Henrietta had a profound influence on me in terms of my thinking about life! - but especially about culture and music in particular. Many of our conversations about the ideas behind Down Home Radio were challenging to me, and she always expressed her thoughts and positions very clearly and without reservation. We almost always came to agree, and her positions were always calculated to challenge me in ways that needed challenging. Henrietta imparted more abstract things to me as well, such as how to hear and see music in a more universal way, how to open my ears.

She often liked to repeat a saying she had heard from an ethnomusicological informant in Mexico, “la ley es una cosa y la vida es un otra,” - “the law is one thing and life is another.” Henrietta used music, particularly the texts of songs, to find out about the real customs and thoughts of people, not empty assertions about the law as defined by government officials and the clergy. She was very adamant about that. Henrietta believed that the mechanisms governing people’s real lives, as reflected in their songs, had to do with a system of “sexual politics” and the interaction between the roles of men and women in a society.

I have not even begun here to list her works. For more information on her books as well as her many fascinating articles, criticism (she wrote for the American Record Guide, Sing Out! and many other publications) fieldwork, radio appearances and other endeavors visit her website at www.HenriettaYurchenco.com . There you will also find a more complete chronology of her extraordinary and eventful life.

Best regards-

Eli Smith New York City Dec. 16th, 2007

Henrietta’s books are:

“Around the World in 80 Years: A Musical Odyssey” MRI 2003 - Her autobiography

“In Their Own Voices: Women in the Judeo-Hispanic Song and Story”- You can read this right on her website! And hear all the field recordings!

“Hablamos! Puerto Ricans Speak.” Praeger, 1971.

“A Mighty Hard Road: The Woody Guthrie Story.” McGraw-Hill, 1970. - Henrietta wrote the first biography of Woody Guthrie- It’s great!

“A Fiesta of Songs from Latin America and Spain.” Putnam’s Sons, 1966.

Here are links to some of her articles you can read online:

“Mean Mama Blues: Bessie Smith and the Vaudeville Era”. Music, Gender, and Culture, Berlin, 1990

“In Defense of Bob Dylan.” Sounds and Fury, 1965; reprinted in The New Sound (Scholastics), New York, 1966, reprinted in Bob Dylan, Four Decades of Commentary, 1998.

“Skinhead Serenade: The Songs of Neo-Nazis”.

Here is a link to the obituary from the New York Times.

Condolences and Mass Cards can be sent to PO Box 336, Dover, NH 03821-0336. New York Times Article

I know things have been rather slow here of late. I haven’t gone away or given up. I’ve been quite busy with another project and I’ll continue to be pretty busy and or traveling for the rest of this month.

After that I’ll begin to get through the huge pile of CD’s and that DVD that people have sent for review. There’s lot of good stuff to post about.

Perhaps I’ll see some of you at the Falcon Ridge Festival later this summer and I plan to be at NERFA again this fall.

I hope you all have a great summer and hear lots of great music.

Thanks for reading,

-Ken

This year’s conference will be held November 2-4, 2007 at the Hilton Vancouver Washington near Portland, Oregon.

Join the best of the west at the 4th Annual Folk Alliance Western Regional Conference. Meet the people who are making things happen in folk music from all over the west. The FAR-West Annual conference is ideal for Performing Artists, Presenters, Record Industry, Agents & Managers, Media, Arts Administrators, Folk Societies/Clubs, Folklorists, and DJs. Help build a stronger music community on the west coast while advancing your career and gaining valuable contacts at the same time!

Registration fee includes all Workshops, Panels, Seminars, Exhibit Hall Entrance, Showcases, and Jamming Sessions. Learn how to build your community, career and contacts while making and listening to music with your peers. It’s about networking and building relationships that will advance your music career. Showcase opportunities abound and it’s fairly affordable.

Please note that “EARLY BIRD” REGISTRATION for the conference runs through May 31st. The “early bird” prices is just $115 for the whole weekend. After June 1st, the price jumps $40. You can download the Registration Package from the FAR-West website at www.far-west.org

To apply for the Main Showcase, go to: http://www.sonicbids.com/farwest2007 (All applications for the Main Showcase must go through Sonicbids.)

Last year’s conference was a wonderful experience. Our concerts series at the Jack Russell Brewery over half of those we have booked over the last couple of years where people showcasing at the Folk Alliance or the FAR West conferences. Great people, great fun, and hopefully a positive push for your music, too.

All the details, including hotel registration, are available on the FAR-West website at: http://www.far-west.org

Merlefest 2007 begins this Thursday, April 26th, on the campus of Wilkes Community College in North Carolina. It’s one of the largest Americana music festivals in the country. This year, Main Stage performers include Doc Watson, Alison Krauss, Pam Tillis, The Waybacks, Sam Bush, Earl Scruggs, The Duhks and more.

The Wilkes Community College campus radio station, WSIF, has carried a feed from the Watson Stage, on its broadcast for many years. This year, for the first time ever, WSIF will be streaming their radio signal, so fans around the world can listen in. At showtime, go to www.radiofreemerlefest.org to hear the free live feed.

Again this year, www.mvyradio.com will be at Merlefest, recording, archiving and rebroadcasting performances from the stages of Merlefest. You can hear selected sets during regular broadcasting hours on the station’s stream. Performances from participating artists will be posted on mvy’s Merlefest page, http://mvyradio.com/musicinfo/merlefest2007.php. There will also be tons of pictures, interviews and a Merlefest journal on that page.

Hear a Merlefest preview show from April 11th, hosted by WSIF’s Al DeLaChica, at http://www.mvyradio.com/archives/index.php?browse=hot_seat.

Red Truck Radio was born of a desire to connect with songwriters and artists who make music for the love of it. This site is truly “about us”; whether we’re among those who like to sing traditional mountain music in a town like Mountain View Arkansas, gospel music after dinner on the grounds at a tiny country church, or our own creations. Red Truck Radio is about the songs that got written because they were aching inside somebody to come out!

Many of the guests come from Mountain View Arkansas the rest come from all over.

www.redtruckradio.com

Club Passim is planning a memorial see http://clubpassim.org/ for details.

Scott Alarik wrote an obituary in the Boston Globe.