Deeper Roots Radio

Friday the 13th finds Deeper Roots wandering into the shadows, where the streets are wet, the bars are closing, and the jukebox has a few secrets of its own. We're traveling through nearly a century of American music, from Duke Ellington's mysterious jazz and Peggy Lee's after-hours blues to the dark Americana of Neko Case, Mark Lanegan, Morphine, and the Black Heart Procession. There are lonely h...

Somewhere along a lonely Mississippi highway, the story goes, a young bluesman met the devil at a crossroads and traded his soul for the ability to play guitar like no one before him. Truth? Folklore? Nearly ninety years after Robert Johnson’s mysterious death, the legend still haunts American music. This Friday on Deeper Roots , we’re chasing that legend down Highway 61, through tales of devilish...

American music has traveled in every direction. Along the somewhat crooked path it’s followed on its journey, there have been new sounds, new words, and new identities collected along the way. And that's what we'll be exploring in this week’s episode: the song behind the song. The stories will not involve just covers or familiar standards performed by different artists. On the contrary, we'll be d...

Ever notice how one conversation can take you somewhere you never expected? Music works the same way. This week on Deeper Roots, we're following a trail of musical connections where every song has something in common with the one before it. A shared lyric, a songwriter, a place, a name, or just an unexpected twist that takes us down another road. We'll wander from the soulful sounds of The Undispu...

Last week on Deeper Roots, we went searching for the ancestry of soul music, following its trail through gospel quartets, blues shouters, rhythm & blues and the vocal traditions that supplied its language and emotional fire. This week, we continue, crossing into the late 1950s and early ’60s when those ingredients began coming together as a music increasingly recognized as soul. These are the...

Soul music didn’t suddenly appear in the 1960s. Its roots were a product of decades in church pews, blues clubs, juke joints and beyond. This week, Deeper Roots begins a special two-part journey excavating the familiar classics to explore the fertile ground from which soul music grew. In this first of two episodes, we’ll hear the gospel quartets, blues shouters, rhythm & blues singers and voca...

Saddle up, but don’t expect the usual Hollywood version of the American West. We’re heading beyond the familiar standards to explore songs, stories and voices that grew out of bunkhouses, chuck wagons and wide-open country, reaching back nearly a century for early cowboy recordings, among them Carl T. Sprague, Billie Maxwell, Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock and Jess Morris. Tales where ornery horse...

No particular destination this week, although we’ll begin on an Island of Dreams . Deeper Roots is going free form once again, rummaging around in the dusty digital archives and following the music wherever it happens to lead us. We’ll start things off with a decidedly British flavor, with Nick Lowe, Martin Belmont & Geraint Watkins, Mickey Jupp and Dave Edmunds before crossing a few oceans, d...

Everybody loves a good story…and this week on Deeper Roots we’ll be spinning a few of them. Tall tales, fables, murder ballads, historical yarns, talking blues and outright stretchers are all part of the American musical tradition, and we’ll be digging into that tradition this Friday morning. Our stories come mostly from the years between 1925 and 1960, when an old tale might travel from a front p...

Labor Day weekend may mark the unofficial end of summer, but around here, summer isn’t going quietly. In this week’s show, we’re giving the season one last fling with a free-form romp through songs of summer nights, summer rain, summer romance, warm breezes and those memories that seem to linger long after the days begin getting shorter. And, as is the common theme, we’ll be traveling all over the...

There's a certain kind of poetry in country music that only it seems to understand. This week on Deeper Roots, we're embracing one of the genre's oldest companions: lonesome. From the high, mournful harmonies of Bill Clifton, The Delmore Brothers, and The Country Gentlemen to the heartfelt storytelling of The Louvin Brothers, Hank Williams, James Hand, George Jones, and Don Gibson, we'll spend two...

What did America sound like in 1925? Join us for a special episode of Deeper Roots as Dave welcomes Josh Rosenthal, founder of Tompkins Square Records, into the studio for an extraordinary musical deep dive. Josh takes us inside the newly minted anthology, Dick Spottswood & Tompkins Square Present…1925 Songs . This 32-track collection spotlights a pivotal, watershed year in American music hist...

No theme this week. No genre studies. No artist retrospectives. Just two hours of great American music. We're in a free-form mood, wandering once again through the dusty digital archives of the past century in search of songs that simply deserve to be heard. Pour yourself a favorite morning libation and settle in as we journey from the elegant dance band sounds of George Olsen to the gypsy jazz br...

This Friday on Deeper Roots, we’re tipping our hats to some of the finest country artists of the 20th century with a journey far beyond the familiar hits. From the outlaw spirit of Waylon Jennings and the wit of Roger Miller to the Bakersfield fire of Dwight Yoakam, the timeless charm of Little Jimmy Dickens, and many more, we’ll dig into the deep tracks, hidden gems, and overlooked performances t...

This week we celebrate the simple joys that have always bound American music together. Deeper Roots travels back nearly a century—from the roaring jazz of Ethel Waters, Fletcher Henderson, and Coleman Hawkins to the contemporary wit of Kacey Musgraves—finding common threads of laughter, resilience, friendship, and the everyday pleasures that make life worth living. Along the way we'll make a party...

Free form and completely eclectic—that is the absolute best way to introduce this week’s episode of Deeper Roots. Every so often, we love to shake things up by forgoing our usual archival explorations of specific genres, artists, or historical themes. Instead, Dave is opening up his personal vault for a special curation of deep tracks and personal favorites that he has been setting aside over the...

This Friday, Deeper Roots presents an encore broadcast from February 2020, exploring the rich intersection of gospel, blues, and tradition through the theme of the “Travelin’ Blues.” Whether the journey leads down the King’s Highway toward salvation or along a lonely back road toward temptation, we’ll steer clear of the toll roads and follow the winding paths where sacred and secular music have tr...

Tomorrow isn’t a guarantee; it’s a promise we keep to one another. In times when the airwaves and headlines feel crowded with division, hatred, and the loud noise of demagoguery, all in reaction to barbarous and vile language from the highest quarters, the antidote has always been found in the music. This week on Deeper Roots, we are celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary by stepping directly...

We revisit a show from ten years back that focused on R&B, sax, and a time before rock 'n' roll shook the world. A time of honkers and shouters. This week on Deeper Roots, we dig into the wild, joyful, and groundbreaking world of mid-century rhythm and blues through the lens of Arnold Shaw's classic book Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues. From the jump bands and saxoph...

This week on Deeper Roots, we’re celebrating the women who helped shape Americana music. From pioneering artists who blazed trails through country, folk, blues, and gospel to the remarkable performers carrying those traditions into the 21st century, we’ll spend two hours exploring voices that transformed the sound of American roots music. We’ll begin with some of the giants of the genre—artists su...

This week on Deeper Roots, the records come with instructions. From dance crazes and rhythm commands to songs about not knowing what comes next, we’re asking — and answering — ‘Let’s Do It!.’ Two hours of blues, rock ’n’ roll, soul, and jukebox rhythm from the past century, all with a demand that we get our booties moving or our bodies boogie’n. From Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King to The Dovells, Chub...

We're taking an encore spin this morning...going back to a show first broadcast as "Country Leftovers" in late 2019. But it deserved a better name “…and I fell asleep with a troubled dream and dreamed I road on the hellbound train.” Just one line from one track from our Friday morning Deeper Roots show which focuses on some country songs ‘from the edge’. An eclectic blend of sometimes morose and o...

We’ve got ourselves a musical breadcrumb trail show featuring songs connected by titles, themes, characters, occupations, relationships, Cajun culture, tattoos, grace, summer romance, and a healthy dose of American eccentricity. We’ll be taking our journey from country to rockabilly, some Howlin’ Wolf, classic doo-wop, folk, gospel, swamp pop, and everything in between. It’s a scenic route through...

Roll down the windows and put that pedal to the metal because we’ve got two hours of wild rhythms and deep cuts this coming Friday. We’ll be digging into those slap-back echo, train-beat rhythms and wild-eyed energy of rockabilly music — that explosive blend of country, blues, boogie and early rock ’n’ roll that rattled America in the 1950s and helped redraw the cultural map for a generation of te...

From rocking celebrations to hard-earned reflections, this week’s episode of Deeper Roots turns its attention to the man they called “The King.” We’ve got two hours with songs about Elvis Presley — musical tributes, name-drops, eulogies, and love letters from artists across the past century. Some are playful, some reverent, and some wrestle with the contradictions that made Elvis both larger than...