In Memoriam R2RS, 1981-1997

David Gregory

Presumably readers outside of Alberta will at least know some of the contours of the difficulties radio station CKUA has faced over the last fewyears. In 1993, we commented on the Klein government's <hoopping of the station from the list of provincial activities. The act of privatizing CKUAmay have also included setting a mole in place; at least, when the executive director announced that the station had to fold because it was bankrupt,many listeners and observers wondered at her role in this. At the time, although popular press commentators mocked the sorts of programming the

station offered, enough Albertans came to the aid of the station that it was at least temporarily saved.Unfortunately, CKUA is embroiled in controversy yet again, and the end of it all is difficult to foresee. Our discussion of the original privatization

of CKUA included comments that were not entirely favorable, but the point is not that CKUA needs to be perfect to be valuable. Board member DavidGregory's discussion of the joys and difficulties of producing one of the CKUA programs of greatest interest to our readers offers insights into what

makes the station, as well as Gregory's own radio work, extremely valuable.All of this provides more context to the discussion of CBC that takes up our editorial pages this issue. Any attempt to balance education and

entertainment will meet with resistance and non-comprehension. Once upon a time, the resistance was as likely to come from the academic side, but Isuspect that this is no longer true. It's been years since I encountered anyone at a university who doubted the value of studying the work of JohnColtrane or Elvis Presley. But the same midbrow mentality that questions the CKUA playlist loves to claim that some areas studied by scholars are so

obscure as to be worthless-just glance at your local paper whenever the Learneds come to your town.Obscure or not, music is fun. Radio programming like CKUA's or the CBC's fulfills the same function as a good library, as one writer, to help

people believe that the rest of the world really exists. Something a serious rocker like Johnny V will attest to-on his first trip west, fiddling with the carradio dial, he hit on Sonny Boy Williamson, being broadcast on CKUA. Not something one was likely to get north of Chicago or after 1965. When thestation started to fade, he made the driver stop the car, so he could listen. This wasn't new music to Johnny (he already knew he loved it), but it

probably was to someone in Alberta. -GWL

CKUA is a commercial station and de-pendent for its very existence on adver-tising revenue, the struggle to find a sm-isfactory blend will be all the harder.

Ragtime to Rolling Stones shouldbe understood, and judged, in the contextof this challenge. I believe-though, ofcourse, you may discount this as specialpleading-that it was the most successfulof all CKUA's attempts to find the rightbalance. At its height the program had anaudience of about lO,(XX), and even in itslast year of broadcast when most of theindividual programs had been aired atleast a dozen times each there was still afaithful following of about 4,(XX) fans. Soit was reasonably popular, and yet forthose who listened regularly it did morethan entertain.

Ragtime to Rolling Stones is nowjust a memory. The last program wasbroadcast in November 1997, sixteenyears after the series first hit the air inthe fall of 1981. It seems an appropriatetime to look back on the project, evaluatewhat it achieved and whether it was allworth while, and perhaps begin to put itinto some kind of historical perspective.But for those readers who don't live inAlberta or who never discovered theCKUA Radio network, I should stop andexplain what R2RS or, as we affection-ately called it, Ragstones, was all about.

Ragtime to Rolling Stones com-prised one hundred and four one-hourradio programs, tracing the history of(mainly American) popular music fromapproximately 1900 to 1970. It beganwith ragtime, and it ended with jazz-rockfusion and folk-rock. In between it pro-vided both a chronological coverage ofthe development of most genres of popu-lar music (Tin Pan Alley pop and Broad-way shows were two exceptions) and aseries of feature programs on individualartists or groups. Somebody, somewhereelse, may have put together an even morecomprehensive audio survey of the his-

tory of modern Western popular music,but if they have, I've never come acrossit. Certainly Ragstones was much moresystematic-and, dare I say it, morescholarly-than any of the glitzy specialson the history of rock that occasionallygrace our TV screens. And of course itwent back further, tracing such musicaltraditions as blues, jazz, country, andfolk music from the very first years thatlistenable recordings were made to theirlate flowering in the golden decade of thesixties.

Perhaps some future historian of Al-berta's cultural and intellectual life in thelate twentieth century will give more thana passing footnote to CKUA Radio's on-going attempts to develop a style ofevening programming that successfullyblends education and entertainment. Com-plying with its CRTC mandate (to pro-vide a minimum number of hours of edu-cational broadcasting) while still obtain-ing good audience ratings has alwaysbeen a tough challenge for a net-workwhich broadcasts on both AM and FMthroughout the province and has all thecosts associated with providing that kindof geographical coverage. Now that

Ragtime to Rolling Stones was, ina way, an offshoot of another radio seriesI made for CKUA back in the earlyeighties. In those days Athabasca Univer-sity was not much more than a pilot proj-ect housed in a couple of warehouses onan industrial park in northwest Edmon-ton, but when I joined the university in1979 it already had a collaborative rela-

6... BULIEl1N de musique folklorique canadienne 32.3 (1998)

tionship with the ACCESS TV Networkwhich happened to be officially in chargeof the Alberta government's radio net-work. So if ACCESS Radio CKUA hadan educational mandate from the CRTC,and if ACCESS TV was already helpingAlberta's fledgling Open University, whyshouldn't CKUA play its part in deliver-ing distance learning courses also?

Why not, indeed, thought AU's newHumanities professor. The result wasWriters and Thinkers, a series of sev-enty-two spoken word programs on sub-jects that ranged from Sophocles andJesus of Nazareth to Karl Marx and T .S.Eliot. I think my greatest achievement inthe W&T series, and probably the pro-gram that had the lowest listener count ofall, was a feature on the philosophersBertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgen-stein that took me an entire week toscript. Well, it was definitely educationalradio, and I thought it was great fun try-ing to beat CBC's Ideas team at theirown game, but was it entertaining? Ex-cept for a small minority of listeners whofelt starved of serious ideas and gooddrama, I think not. Certainly the stationmanager at CKUA thought it was all atad too heavy, a bit too intellectual evenfor the kind of minority audience that thestation was aiming to please. So whatcould we do instead? How about a music

program?

good. It was egalitarian, at least: MilesDavis and Blind Lemon Jefferson werereduced to the same aural lowest commondenominator. But it wasn't really satis-factory. And, to tell you the truth, Ididn't much like teaching by teleconfer-ence, and I wasn't very good at it:

"Jennifer in Stetler, can you tell mewhich Alberta artist was strongly influ-enced by Jimmy Rodgers?"

Deathly silence, then an apologeticvoice from the other Stetler student:

nOh, Professor Gregory, Jennifer justpopped out to buy us some coffee and

doughnuts!"The seminars turned more and more

into lectures, and the students suggestedthat, maybe, I could send them cassettesof both the lectures and the music. Noproblem in mailing out lectures on cas-sette, in fact I still do it. But cassettes ofthe music, no way! Why? Prohibited bythe Canadian Copyright Act, at least asinterpreted by the University's copyrightofficer. Well then, how about putting themusic on CKUA radio? Sounds like agood reason for a collaborative project...and thus the idea of Ragtime to RollingStones was born.

have fully scripted my commentary.Brian let them pass, but he decided Ineeded reining in. Ragstones must beentertaining, he insisted, with lots ofmusic and only a little jabber by thatlong-winded professor. Chastened, I gavein. We swung to the other extreme, andone or two of the other early programsessentially consist of music linked by aminimalist DJ stating song titles and whoplayed them.

With half-a-dozen shows under ourbelt, Brian and I sat down for what ineducational jargon is known as a forma-tive evaluation session. It took all of fiveminutes, and we've been firm friends ev-er since. We agreed that we were bothright: there was too much talk in theprograms done my way, too little in theprograms done his way, and there was noreason on earth why we couldn't find agood compromise between the two. Wenow had a concept and a goal: the rightbalance between education and entertain-ment.

The remaining one hundred or soprograms of Ragtime to Rolling Stonesmore or less implemented the concept.On the whole, I think we succeeded. Wemade two 52-part series. The first serieswas unscripted, and if I was having a badday it might take us four or five hours tolay down one hour of much-edited tape.We often started working at about lOpm,after our kids were in bed and when wecould be sure to find an empty studio.That meant that we saw quite a fewbleary-eyed Edmonton sunrises. In retro-spect I'm amazed at how tolerant Brianwas of my repeated inability to say whatI wanted in a concise and articulate way.It was funny, I could do fine until themicrophone was switched on, and thensuddenly my tongue turned to rubber and

kept getting caught in my teeth Ah well, I did eventually get more

relaxed, and I think I improved withtime. It was just like giving lectures,really. I find that if I have the security ofa written text, I can depart from it and adlib without any difficulty, but if I havenothing in front of me the mind has ahorrible tendency of going blank at thewrong moment. So I semi-scripted thesecond series. If you listen carefully, youcan sometimes hear the difference. In thelater programs I sound more confident

Sometime in the summer of 1981, Iwas assigned a producer, and Lady Lucksmiled on me because it was Brian Duns-more.

"Let's make the programs live totape," quoth he.

"What's that?" said I.He explained we would record each

program the week before it was due to beaired, and if I got tongue-tied he wouldroll the tape back and let me do that bitagain. Don't write scripts, he advised,just come prepared with a few notes andchat about the music. I did my best,which wasn't always that wonderful, andBrian turned out to be a champion at rol-ling back tape.

And we soon got into the big debateabout education versus entertainment. Thefirst couple of programs, on ragtime andon the beginnings of recorded jazz, wemade the way I wanted, which meantquite a lot of talk explaining the musicand putting it into its historical context.At the time I was quite pleased with howthey sounded, although I was obviouslynervous and it might have been better to

One of the great things about Atha-basca University in the very early dayswas that its professors really did haveacademic freedom. We had precious fewresources, but we did have a lot of enthu-siasm and energy, and nobody much waslooking over our shoulder and disapprov-ing of our experiments in distance educa-tion. One of my experiments was acourse on the history of popular musicwhich I initially tried to teach by meansof a series of teleconferenCed seminarslinking students scattered allover Alber-ta. Apart from the fact that the telecon-ference bridge kept losing contact withstudents:

"Hello, Grande Prairie, are you stillthere?"

Deathly silence.I got feedback from the students that thesound quality when I played music overthe telephone lines really wasn't very

Canadian Folk Music BULIEl1N 32.3 (1998) ...7'c='"", ~--=

but less spontaneous. With scripting youspend more hours in preparation, but themethod works. And after the government,in its wisdom, moved the university toAthabasca, we ended up making two pro-grams a night on each of my fortnightlytrips to Edmonton. So the scripting ap-proach won out, for better or for worse.I think it gave the later programs aslightly more formal feel, subtly em-phasising that they were educational ra-dio. But I hope and believe that theywere always fun to listen to.

odies in that program.Some programs stick in my mind for

other reasons. For example, there was theone on Appalachian hillbilly music thatgot me and CKUA attacked as racists bythe Edmonton black community. I played

was probably in its last broadcast year. Itwasn't. High noon came and went. "Run,Nigger, Run" defiled the air-waves of Al-berta for many years to come, and theEdmonton Black Cultural Associationeven forgave me enough to invite me togive a lecture on some aspect of Afro-American music history. I played safeand chose Tampa Red.

The chronological programs werequite a challenge. We had to create asense of natural flow and continuity be-tween the tracks I had chosen to best il-lustrate the musical highlights of a giventwo-year period. Somehow each cut hadto lead naturally into the next, eventhough we were ranging widely over thewhole spectrum of popular music. Itwasn't easy, so I feel warm and fuzzytowards those programs where I thinkwe succeeded.

An example of a good one is # 34,first series, on Years of Transition,1959-60. It begins with the LondonYouth Choir singing "The H-Bomb'sThunder," protest music from the greatAldermaston March against British nu-clear weapons, and it ends with theCharles Mingus Jazz Workshop per-forming a trenchant protest against

American discrimination and segrega-tion, "Original Faubus Fables." In be-tween we have Pete Seeger performing"Bells of Rhymney" at the Newport FolkFestival, a very young Joan Baez singing"Banks of the Ohio" oh-so-carefully andbeautifully, Barbara Dane emoting"Dink's Blues," Lightning Hopkins' fineacoustic version of "See That My GraveIs Kept Clean," urban blues from BlindArvella Grey recorded live on Chicago'sMaxwell Street, Howlin' Wolf's magnif-icent "Spoonful," Ray Charles' electrify-ing "What'd I Say," the Everly Brotherswith "Problems," British traditional jazzfrom the Chris Barber Band with a won-derful muted solo from trumpeter PatHalcox, highly atmospheric poetry andmodem jazz from Christopher Loguewith the Tony Kinsey band, searing free-form jazz from Omette Coleman, andmodal jazz from Miles Davis' classicKind of Blue album. Apart fom the jumpfrom the Everlys to Chris Barber, it allgoes very smoothly, and every one of thetracks is a winner. Those were the days,eh?

a song by Gid Tanner and the SkilletLickers called "Run, Nigger, Run," andthe phones started ringing. I was sum-moned to explain my crime to the station

manager."Well," I said, "the course and the

program try to put the music in its socialcontext. This song was recorded in theAmerican Deep South in the 1920s, andthe language of the lyrics reflects that. Infact, if you listen carefully, you'll seethat the song dates from before the Amer-ican Civil War and encourages slaves toescape. And so it reflects the mutual hos-tility felt by blacks and by white hillfarmers towards the big cotton plantationowners. It's actually an anti-racist song."

The station manager nonethelessthought it might be prudent to remake theprogram with another selection from theSkillet Lickers repertoire. I politely-1hope it was politely-refused, saying thatI wasn't in the business of sanitizing his-tory and that I felt my academic freedomwas being infringed. There was nothingmore to say, and I walked out of the of-fice at high noon feeling that Ragstones

Yes, of course I have some favour-ite programs, and some others that stickout in my mind. My favourites tend toreflect the musical content of those pro-grams rather than anything that I con-tributed to them. By and large, I likebest the programs that include my musi-cal heroes. For example, my top pickscertainly include the feature on Bix Bei-derbecke, who was for my money a truegenius, the greatest ever jazz cometplayer, and whose wonderful music isunfortunately almost totally neglectedthese days, even by CKUA. Then thereis the program on Lester Young and Bil-lie Holiday, one of the occasions when(at least in my judgment) weaving twomusical portraits together succeededbeautifully. And, of course, I love all thefolk revival programs, including (amongothers) those on the Cambridge/Bostonfolk scene, on the Newport Festivals, onPete Seeger and Jean Ritchie, on TomRush and Eric Anderson, on Phil Ochs,on Bert Jansch and John Renboume, andon Fairport Convention and Steeleye

Span.I'm particularly proud of R2RS, sec-

ond series, # 38, on the development oftraditional folk song on both sides of theAtlantic between the late 1940s and themid-1960s. The program includes per-formances of narrative ballads and folklyrics by five American singers: BurlIves, Susan Reed, Cynthia Gooding, Peg-gy Seeger and Hedy West, and by fourBritish solo singers: Ewan MacColl, A.L.Lloyd, Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins,as well as an a cappella group, the Water-sons. Names you don't often hear on theradio, I regret to say, but no lover oftraditional folksong will have difficulty inrecognising the special quality of the mel-

BULLEl1N de musique folkJoriqut' canadienne 32,3 (1998)

ample-got their own feature programs,

but all too often it was only half-an-hour.

Pete Seeger, will you ever forgive me?

Please understand that I really, really

needed to include Jean Ritchie too Well, in retrospect I think I should have

had the courage of my convictions and

planned more than fifty-two programs to

start with. And kept going after we hit

number 102.

Yes, there should have been a third

series. Why did it never happen'! Mainly

because of the move of Athabasca Uni-

versity from Edmonton to Athabasca. To

make use of the valuable CKU A record

library, the programs had to be made in

Edmonton, yet neither AU nor CKUA

wanted to pay my travel expenses from

Athabasca. I was donating my time and

expertise free in any case, so I thought

both the AU administration and the AC-

CESS bureaucrats were being cheap, un-

reasonable, and unappreciative of what

we had achieved. Actually, I still think

that. Anyway, I took umbrage and quit.

But by then we already had enough ma-

terial on tape for student purposes, and I

had other fish to fry (such as writing a

book on the history of Athabasca Landing

and editing one on George Ryga). None-

theless, the ideal Ragtime to Rolling

Stones would have included a systematic

year-by-year coverage from 1920 to

1970, most feature programs would have

devoted a full hour to each important

artist or group, and all the glaring gaps

would have been filled.

Ragtime to Rolling Stones is gone,

but its spirit lives on in the two replace-ment programs I now host on the new,commercial CKUA. The Long Weekend,which is broadcast every Monday eveningat 9pm, surveys the history of Americanpopular music between the two WorldWars. As good ecologists, Brian and Irecycled some two dozen R2RS programsto fit into The Long Weekend; the otherhalf of this 48-part series consists of newprograms. One of my favourites is on BixBeiderbecke's buddy, C-melody saxo-phonist and band-leader Frankie Trum-bauer. Another, called Blues from Sun-flower County, is on the disciples of thatfounding father of the Delta blues,Charlie Patton. But I digress The other new series, Bop to Rock,

airs on Tuesday nights at 9pm and dealswith the popular music of the 1940s and1950s. Again we are recycling some rele-vant R2RS programs, but there are lotsof new ones too. My favourites include acouple on Alan Lomax's field collectingin the 1940s, not to mention the featureson Thelonious Monk, Muddy Waters,Elmore James, Amos Milburn, Roy Mil-ton, and the early recordings of CharlieParker on the Savoy and Dial labels.Hopefully the series does a good job ofcapturing the development of such musi-cal traditions as bebop, urban blues, r&b,rock 'n' roll, and, of course, the folksongrevival. And, as always, we're trying tofind the perfect blend of music andinformation. The search for that elusivebalance between education and enter-ainment still goes on...

Looking back, what would I do dif-ferently if I was beginning over'? Well,perhaps a couple of things. We made adecision early on that the first serieswould consist of a mix of chronologicalprograms and features. In order to leaver()Om for the features, that meant thateach of the chronological programs hadto deal with two years or, occasionally,three or four years. Usable recordingswere scarce before 1915, so basically wecovered the decades from World War I to1970 in two-year hops. That meant thatwe had to be highly selective in thechoice of representative material withonly six to eight cuts allowed from eachcalendar year. Fine for some of the earlyyears, maybe, but it got kind of ridic-ulous later on, especially in the 1950sand 1960s, In retrospect I think it wouldhave been better to have used all fifty-two programs of the first series to pro-vide systematic chronological coverage ona year-by-year basis whenever there wassufficient material to do so.

Another decision we took early on,when we were thinking in terms of onlyone set of fifty-two programs, was todouble-up the featured artists. So most ofthe feature programs gave the first half-an-hour to one performer and the secondhalf-an-hour to another (Chuck Berry andBo Diddley, to choose one example atrandom) or intertwined the careers of twofairly similar artists (for instance, JoanBaez and Judy Collins). Some really bignames-Jimmy Rodgers, Woody Guthrie,Elvis Presley, and John Coltrane, for ex-

"""Folk singing can no longer be considered a living lradilion, for mOSl of lhe singers are recalling songs lhey have nOl sung for /Wenty, foTty, or saty years.

Nevel1heless, a sulprising number can reproduce lenglhy ballads wilhoul hesilalion. Every coUeclor is lanlalized by fragmenls of songs once known and now forgonen,bUl on lhe whole lhe (mlario singers manage 10 provide complele and wen-rounded versions.

Edith Fowke CFMS Newslener Bulletin 2.1&2 (July /967)

JjJjJj

Bu.t there are also songs bom [from] the st/Uggle for existence in the Prairies, all of them humorous: "Flunky Jim,song of the Depression years, ..~skatchewan, the land of snow. .

H HE.P. Walker" and the valiantly cheerjill

William A.S. Sarjeant Canada Folk Bulletin 1.5 (September/October 1978)

..,..,..,

After tea, we discussed a variety of topics before the fire; and Mrs. Micawber was good enough to sing us (in a smaU, thin,Jlat voice, which I remembered tohave considered, when I first knew her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite baUads of "The Dashing White Sergeant" and "Little TaJJlin. "

DIaries Dickens David Coppeljield (Yannoulh, England)