As summer swings along, and people all over the country are enjoying music, food, and the outdoors, From the Vault listens back to a 1974 music festival worth remembering. San Diego is the city where in 1967 a man by the name of Lou Curtiss found a way to bring folk music legends Bill Monroe, Gil Turner, Sam Hinton, and the Possum Hunters to perform in the first San Diego Folk Festival. Year after year, the festival grew — and by 1974, it was the premiere folk music festival on the West Coast. The San Diego Folk Festival had grown so large that in addition to the music performances, workshops were included on such subjects as blues piano, banjo picking and songwriting, to name a few.
We have Roz and Howard Larman to thank for the recordings featured this week. Roz and Howard Larman started the legendary FolkScene radio program on KPFK in 1970, which soon became the Hollywood hotspot for folk musicians to entertain audiences with an intimate on-air performance; while Howard passed away in 2007, Roz continues strong, hosting the iconic series every Sunday night at 6:00 pm on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles. In this episode of From the Vault, we’ll let Roz introduce these talented singers and songwriters in her own voice from the original 1974 recordings. We’ll hear performances from Mary McCaslin, “Young Wesley;†Jim Ringer, “Father Time;†Bruce Utah Phillips, “Jesse Garcia;†Hazel Dickens, “Black Lung;†Alice Gerrard, “Missing Jenny;†John Wilcox, “Tree of Life;†Patty Hall, “Daddy Please;†Debby McClatchy, “California Faith;†John Bosley, “Humerous Song;†and Tom Waits, “Heart of Saturday Night†and “Better Off Without a Wife.†Special thanks to FolkScene hosts Howard Larman and Roz Larman; FolkScene engineers Alan Kanter, Steve Barker, Peter Cole, and Peter Cutler; and Pacifica Radio Archives volunteer Curtis Metcalf, for transferring and researching material for this episode.
From the Vault is presented through the Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, funded in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, past grants from the Grammy Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Archive funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, along with the generous support of Pacifica Radio listeners.
First broadcast on Friday, September 26, 2008; rebroadcast on Friday, July 27, 2012.
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