The Wormlips Scrapbook

The first public radio series I ever produced was made possible by the first grant I ever got, from National Public Radio’s Satellite Program Development Fund in the mid-eighties. As I remember, the award totaled $10,000 and the project took three years.

I love this series, but I am still mortally embarrassed by the name I came up with: Skip Through the Shadows: Scenes from Childhood. I’ve always sucked at making up titles. You see, I was trying to convey the idea of both the agony and the joy of childhood.

I gathered well over a hundred hours of interviews around the country, mostly with everyday people but also with a few luminaries. My strangest pairing of interviews consisted of an afternoon with John Waters in Baltimore and a meeting in Pittsburgh the next morning with Fred “Mister” Rogers.

I also interviewed Appalachian singer-songwriter Jean Ritchie, blues legend Brownie McGhee, Big Bird’s inventor Kermit Love, Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and some others. Another of my heroes, Dr. Benjamin Spock, wrote a little testimonial about how much he liked the series.

Producing these programs was a true descent into— I don’t know, but it was very dark in there for a couple years. I guess that’s why I made up the project in the first place. It’s the anti-Hallmark look at childhood in all its despair and magic.

There are ten programs, each about seven-minutes long. I was lucky enough to get them all to air on NPR’s All Things Considered, most of them even in the prime spot: the closing piece of the daily ninety-minute show.

I also won a couple awards, including an Ohio State.

Here is the first program, called I Must Be From Another Planet. You will hear many voices, including a few from my own private life: my grannie, my first-grade daughter reading a story that I wrote in first grade, my dad interviewing three-year-old me about my imaginary friend “Tinna,” and me singing with my friend Maria, accompanied by Dad on guitar. Here’s a secret: you won’t ever know it while listening because of the tapestry of voices, but it’s really all about me and my own pain. T’is the artists’ prerogative.

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For years it’s been nagging at me that I need to digitize my old public radio programs, but I’ve never had a free moment even to figure out where to start.

Well, how’s this for fortuitous: the day I found out I have all this unexpected free time, I stumbled upon a box of DAT tapes of my work: Steel Drivin’ Man (about the John Henry legend), Skip Through the Shadows (my childhood series), A Gathering of Days (Adi’s and my holiday series), something I did about financial abuse of the elderly, and the one you’ll read about in just a second. I didn’t even know I had these in demi-digital form.

So my plan is to upload these thangs to this here blog one by one, as I convert them. Someday I hope to try to salvage all the rest of my stuff, which is on decomposing analog tape.

Before we get to this first program, a little background:

I started as an independent producer for National Public Radio in about 1982. Unsolicited and unknown, I mailed them my first radio piece (about involuntary sterilization abuse of Mexican-American women) and they accepted it. I didn’t learn until much later that it was an exceptionally difficult field to break into. I’m glad I didn’t know, or I might never have tried.

For years I probably earned about ten cents an hour, but it was an incredibly fun time to be working in public radio: a climate of experiment and creativity. I did pretty much whatever I wanted. I accepted a number of assignments from them, but mostly I came up with my own strange ideas and executed them in my own style. The West Coast Desk editors rarely tried to change what I did. I don’t know why I was so lucky.

Here’s something I don’t tell people often: I never listened to much public radio myself. I just liked making it. Maybe that was a good thing, because I wasn’t trying to emulate anyone else’s concept of what public radio should sound like.

Okay, so: this first documentary feature is about rockabilly legend Rose Maddox. I produced it with my friend TJ Meekins, who had a world-class weekly American country and rockabilly radio program on KVMR-FM in Nevada City. Immersed as she was in that culture, she knew (and had interviewed) a bunch of its pioneers. It was she who provided all the knowledge, insight and connections that made the program possible.

Rose was her friend, so she arranged that interview for us. We also flew down to Burbank to interview another of her old pals, country musician and songwriter Cliffie Stone.

I also used bits of earlier interviews she’d done with people including Tennessee Ernie Ford, and archival material she’d tracked down.

It was a fun program to produce because the subject is intriguing and because TJ is a blast. It aired on NPR’s All Things Considered or Weekend All Things Considered (can’t remember which) in whatever year that was. 1996 or 1997, I think. Here it is (13:33 minutes long):

Rose Maddox died around a year after this program aired. So did Cliffie Stone. I’m glad we didn’t procrastinate.

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Draco the Dragon and Spittin’ Willy. The sissy, the shrimp, the scholar and the bully. Meet them in this glimpse into the classroom and the playground.

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