WSUM 91.7FM Madison

This episode is a memorial tribute to Wisconsin music legend Bruce Bollerud, who passed away on August 11, 2020, at age 85. Loose Bruce the Goose was one of his nicknames. He played bandonion, piano, trombone, and accordion. He sometimes played the jug, when the song demanded one. He was a great singer of Norwegian dialect novelty songs, and other varieties of songs. He could yodel. He was the last living member of the Goose Island Ramblers.

I’m playing selections from the Goose Island Ramblers releases on Cuca Records that feature Bruce, some recordings included on the companion CD to Jim Leary’s 2006 book Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music, excerpts featuring Bollerud and the Ramblers from Down Home Dairyland, the radio show Jim Leary and Rick March created in 1989 that was broadcast on Wisconsin Public Radio in the 1990s, and a couple tunes Bruce included in his book International Accordion Favorites.

If you tuned in to the July 23, 2020 episode, you heard selections from film music representing the work of composers and arrangers who have provided memorable musical movie moments with their scores. For this sequel episode, you'll hear songs that were either written for specific movies or have become associated with specific movies due to being incorporated into the narrative by the director and included on the soundtrack.

For those of us with the senses of sight and hearing, watching a movie is as much a sonic experience as a visual one. We’re all watching movies at home during this pandemic, and missing out on the experience of being in a theater and having the images be enormous on the screen and hearing the music come out of multiple speakers arranged so that it feels as if we’re engulfed in sound. Radio can't replicate the theater experience, but listening to selections from some of the greatest film scores seems like a cinematic way to spend an hour.

July 1 was, and is, International Reggae Day. It's a 24-hour global festival anchored in Jamaica, celebrating the best of Jamaica’s music and creativity and its influence around the world. It was launched July 1, 1994 and proclaimed by Jamaica's Governor General Sir Howard Cooke in 2000. The majority of the songs played on this show come from a 4-CD box set we have at Mills Music Library titled The Story of Jamaican Music: Tougher Than Tough, released in 1993 by Mango, a subsidiary label of Island Records. It spans 1958-1993, and includes examples of Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae, Dub, Dancehall, and Ragga. Kaydian “Katie” Campbell, the Mayrent Collection Cataloger at Mills, had added it to our Staff Picks display many months ago. Katie hails from Montego Bay, Jamaica, and has a fondness for languages, old books, and roots reggae. Katie selected songs they know and love for this show, and I chose others.

A musical celebration of Pride Month, this episode is comprised of songs by musicians who represent the L, the G, the B, the T, and the Q, and possibly one of the many additional terms included in the +. Some of these musicians weren’t out while they lived, at least not publicly or in any sort of activist fashion, and some of them were. Some are still living, and have had spans of their artistic lives in which they weren’t open about their sexuality or gender identity, but are now. Definitions and boundaries are bound to be fluid. The music is as varied as the people who created it.

These are songs that have been inspired by racist acts and policies in this country, and that have inspired the people challenging systemic racism and all its manifestations as they seek equality and justice for all.

The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25 set off a national and international movement, a taking to the streets to protest police brutality and the systemic racism of which police brutality is but one expression. George Floyd was merely the latest in a long line of people who have had their lives cut short by either police or vigilante actions. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade are but a few of the other people whose names are on the lips and on the signs of protesters right now.

Songs and chants have long been part of social movements and protests. Songs harness energy, and help us release energy. The songs I’ve selected for today’s show give voice to anger, frustration, grief, outrage, empathy, pride, and hope. It’s hard to know all the songs that are most meaningful to the majority of the people protesting right now, and impossible to know what songs may be written as a result of these actions, but we can spend an hour listening to some of the songs that have responded to racist policies and actions, and songs that have inspired and motivated people to fight the powers that be and work toward change.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries stand in solidarity with our Black and Brown students, staff, faculty, colleagues, and community members. We unequivocally reject the racism, bias, and hatred that has permeated our society.

All UW-Madison campus libraries remain closed to ensure maximum health and safety for students, faculty, staff, and the general public. The State of Wisconsin has begun the phased reopening of some businesses, but it is important to remember the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is far from being contained. It’s also important to remember this is a global pandemic. It is partially with this in mind that I have decided to devote this show to music from around the world, and also because I thought it might be nice to do some virtual traveling while we in the US are still under a Level 4: Do Not Travel, Global Health Advisory from The Department of State. Pack your bags, grab your passport, and join me for a trip around the world.

Launching this radio show this past semester was a bit of an experiment for us, and it will continue to be as we go forward. I’ve been thinking of how everyone has had to be resourceful and imaginative as we all confront the COVID-19 global pandemic and seek to reduce transmission of the novel coronavirus, and some folks have been experimenting with various ways to get through the challenges of this time and keep their spirits up.⁣⁣

⁣So, what are experimental musical instruments? Aren’t most musical instruments other than the human voice the result of human experimentation, testing, and refinement? Indeed they are, however, some of these experiments have become commonplace instruments—such as the piano, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, tuba, and all of the various string instruments: violin, viola, cello, bass, guitar. What I’m going to play are examples of music made on such instruments as the chromolodeon, kithara, cloud-chamber bowl, daxophone, seraphin, theremin, aquavina, whirly, amplified palette, and many more. From Harry Partch to Hal Rammel.

Schools and all businesses deemed non-essential closing. Social distancing. Masks. Recession. Furloughs coming here at UW-Madison. It’s been a lot to process, ever since the novel coronavirus started spreading around the world and people started getting sick with COVID-19 and dying, and it continues to be! So, why the blues? The blues has always been a vehicle for folks facing difficult circumstances and experiences and giving voice to despair and frustration, as well as expressing hope and determination to get through whatever is troubling them.

NEA Jazz Masters are those musicians and figures involved in the creation and promotion of jazz whom the National Endowment for the Arts have awarded the highest honor our nation bestows on jazz artists. Each year since 1982, the program has elevated to its ranks a select number of living legends who have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of jazz. I am limited right now to drawing upon recordings I own that are also in the Mills Music Library collection as I continue to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, so I went through the extensive list of honorees, compared what I have with what’s in Mills, and made some selections. There are 161 Jazz Masters so far, so this show has barely scratched the surface! The complete list is available here: https://www.arts.gov/honors/jazz/year-all

Due to Covid-19, Mills Music Library is currently closed and the Mills Music Library staff is now working from home. Without access to the hundreds of thousands of 78s, LPs, 45s, cassettes, CDs, and various box sets at my whim, to create this show I am now drawing from my own personal library of recordings which can also be found in the Mills Music Library. As it turns out, there is a substantial amount of overlap--everything from recordings by my own musical mentors, Cuca rockabilly, Nordic-American music, Starday recordings and more. There might even be a special guest DJ who joins in on the fracas...

Who is Judy Henske? She’s a legendary singer and songwriter from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, with a powerful voice and a sharp wit. The episode covers her recording career, from the 1962 album she made as a member of Dave Guard & The Whiskeyhill Singers to her 2004 release She Sang California.

Butch Vig and Steve Marker founded Smart Studios in Madison in 1983, and thousands of musicians sent signals to tape (& eventually hard drives) there between then and when it closed in 2010. Many engineers worked many sessions there, too. The focus of this episode is on the variety of music made there by local and regional musicians who didn’t become famous “Alternative Rock” stars in the 1990s—so, no Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, L7, Garbage, etc. Wendy Schneider did a great job telling that tale in her 2016 documentary The Smart Studios Story. The selections played on this episode are from recordings we have in the Wisconsin Music Archives at Mills Music Library.

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For this week’s show, I’ll be highlighting our extensive 78 collection. Those super old, fragile, shellac discs that pre-date LPs and 45s, are the earliest kinds of flat discs that we know as records. They’re called 78s because they spin at 78 revolutions per minute, though prior to 1930, there was no standard speed, so they were often meant to play at 70 or 71.29, or 76.59, or 80 rpm… but for the sake of ease we call them all 78s. We’ve got more than 100,000 78s in our collection spanning from the 1890s to the late 1950s and they cover all sorts of musical and spoken word genres. We have particularly strong 78 collections of ethnic music, early jazz, Yiddish recordings, Paramount Records and other local Wisconsin labels, and today I’m just going to be playing a random assortment of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them, too. We don’t actually check out or loan our 78s, but we circulate them in other ways such as streaming them via our special collections website or playing them on radio programs such as this. We do have a searchable database of our 78s online and if anybody wants to hear a specific record, we’ll be happy to provide a digital copy. So all that said, today I’ll be playing you a smattering of the 78s that I think makes the Mills Music Library’s 78 collection particularly special.

The Black Cultural Center is celebrating Black History Month 2020 with the theme Afrofuturism: B(l)ack to the Future, and we are devoting this episode to surveying some of the music representing and expressing Afrofuturism. This spans from what Sun Ra was doing in the late 1950s to the music Moor Mother is making right about now. You'll hear jazz, funk, electro, and hip-hop. As always, the music you hear on Circulating Sounds is available to borrow from Mills Music Library.

This week I’ll be highlighting the circulating CD box sets in the Mills Music Library. And before I get too far into this show, if you don’t have a CD player, we circulate those too. But today’s show is not entirely about the music on CD. Sure it’s great to hear a tune, but one of the great advantages of CDs is that you can also get pretty detailed liner notes. Another perks of CDs is that they often come in box sets and oftentimes these behemoth box sets come with multiple CDs and book-length liner notes, not to mention the absolutely incredible packaging. So, with that in mind, today’s show is an homage to our circulating CD box sets. They are among my favorite things in the world and Mills Music Library has hundreds and hundreds of them. For today’s show I’ve selected several rare and out-of-print box sets, some amazing local box sets, and some of the most beautiful packaging to ever adorn a musical project.

We are sharing more recordings by faculty from the Mead Witter School of Music at University of Wisconsin-Madison.This episode includes faculty from the following areas: Strings, Keyboards, Voice & Opera, and Woodwinds.

We'll be sharing recordings by faculty from the Mead Witter School of Music at University of Wisconsin-Madison. We have far too many options to choose from for just one episode, so this will only be the first installment.

This week’s show focuses on the Circulating LP collection in the Mills Music Library. Yes, we actually circulate our LPs. You can come to Mills Music Library and check out over 50,000 different LPs. It’s pretty rare that a University circulates their records, but we’re really excited to get this music into people’s hands and ears. If you’re an undergraduate you can keep them for 4 weeks and if you are a faculty/staff/graduate student you can keep them for the entire semester. And if you are a community member, you can purchase a community pass for $40/year, or if you are over 62 it’s just $20, and check out LPs for a month at a time. Of our 50,000 LPs, there is a huge variety of styles of music available and today’s show highlights some of the music that I think is special. I came up with six different categories (All-Time Classics, Cool, Rare, Local, Foreign Language, and Party Music) and we’ll do a few songs of each. If you like what you hear, the call number is listed in the Spinitron playlist.

Today I’m highlighting the Cuca Records collection held at Mills Music Library. Cuca Records was founded by Jim Kirchstein in Sauk City, WI in 1959 and is one of the most famous record labels in Wisconsin. Probably most known for the 1960 Top 5 Billboard hit Mule Skinner Blues by the Fendermen, or maybe the Genius LP by Jimmy Russell or Chicago blues legend Earl Hooker, or maybe the first recordings of Steve Miller and Boz Skaggs, they also recorded a lot of rock, pop, jazz, and a particularly large number of ethnic, polka and old-time bands. Their tag line was “Cuca Records, world’s largest line of old time music.” They also created the world's largest line of circus music. But what often gets swept under the rug is country music. There was a LOT of honky-tonk, rockabilly, western swing, bluegrass, and other styles of music loosely categorized as country music captured in those Cuca grooves and that will be the emphasis of today’s show. Founder Jim Kirchstein donated his collection to Mills in 2017 and all of the music you’ll hear today is part of that collection. Some of it circulates, some of it doesn’t, but it can all be found at the Mills Music Library.