Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Podfolk: A podcast about folk music and folklore found online

Other than the "another kind of communication online" news about Elizabeth Rose and her Storycast, today is a departure from my usual "other journalism" topics. (I'll get back to journalism a little in the last paragraph.)

Elizabeth is a storyteller (and UT grad) who has carried Southern folklore at least as far from home as Hawaii. She launched her weekly Storycast last month and has already included "Jack tales," poetry and singing. If I were writing a movie-poster "blurb" for this podcast, it might be the cliches, "I laughed... I cried..." or "Bring the whole family..." Give a listen. She really knows (and clearly loves) what she's doing.

The other news is that inspiration struck this morning, thanks to Elizabeth Rose here in Tennessee my old friend Dave Schwartz at WPKN in Connecticut... I was sending "Casey Jones" David a note about Elizabeth, and this train of thought developed:

I've been sending people e-mail saying, "hey, listen to this online audio" for years... I know I was already doing it on May 18, 2000, when I turned on the radio and heard Christopher Lydon interviewing a bunch of bloggers, then checked out his website. (I've mentioned, Lydon's role in the birth of podcasting elsewhere.)
I like to spread around old songs, but I play records better than I sing.
Last year I had a great time as a guest on Dave's radio show, talking about the the Internet and folk music with the editor of a folk magazine and a guy who actually learned to play the guitar online.
I've been talking about starting a podcast for a year, since I have everything I need to do it (except time, but maybe if I start out slow...)

The idea: Putting all of those things together, why not send out a short "program" once a week about some of the online folk music and Internet folklore things I've found? It's a kind of "service journalism," I suppose, and it'll be a lot more pleasant than listening to me sing or play the banjo!

This first episode is really just a test to make sure the feed is working. As a "category" of my main weblog, I will put the Podfolk blog items on their own page, but the page will still have links in its margin to my "Other Journalism" sites. Today's test (this page) will appear on both blogs, so the audio sample is a bit of journalism folklore:

There are no comments from me, just Gene Kelly in "Inherit the Wind," speaking one of the most famous slogans in journalism (see my old Web page for some speculative folklore about its origin). It's only a few seconds, a very small ".wav" file that really doesn't need podcasting.

If everything works, the home for this experiment will be a separate Podfolk blog page, and the podcast-only subscription feed should be here:

As the saying goes, "Stay tuned."

At the top of this page I've added a couple of black and white photos I took in the 1970s of a couple of my favorite banjo players. I may change them from time to time. I'd really like to see someone identify the banjo player in the top picture... and some may not realize the left-handed lady played banjo, since she's more famous as a guitar player. If no one else adds a comment identifying them, I will myself... eventually.

11:51:34 AM