Folksingers mar KUOW event

Feliks Banel of HistoryMediaHistory made this video backstage at the live show of Weekday with Steve Scher (KUOW m-f, 9a-12p) on Friday last at Town Hall. If you're interested in what these people look like, take a look, it's a happy place.

BlatherWatch avoided this show - it's been only a month since we went to the last one, and frankly, the thrill was, if not gone, sated - at least for a few years. 

But we listened-in while we were getting our pedicure, and there was dear, old book babe Nancy Pearl, who so adorably tells a Little Joke in Feliks' video.

She was great, but then... there were folksingers.

It must have been someone's idea of "creative radio." They'd found a band of folksingers: real ones... the womenfolk with laced bodices and long hair; the men in tunics and stringed instrumentalia.

They sang their "ditties," that was bad enough, but then producers got them a-interruptin' the talk-talk during the 2nd hour news discussion with baffling, yet stupid, musical interjections.

We know, we know, folksingers are expected to make stupid, musical interjections, but these folksingers, - we fucking kid you not - insisted on singing, in 3 or 4 separate and lengthy interruptions, their interpretations of 3 or 4 separate and lengthy chapters (Ch. 9 & 10; 12-13) of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present, a fabulous basic text for us liberals but fucking maddening when sung into the middle of a discussion of Seattle's tunnel project and the debt ceiling!

If these public radio dopes ever had to defend liberalism like we do every damn day, they wouldn't be offering up slowballs for wingers to hit out of the park such as folksingers singing Howard Zinn on public radio! It's as stereotypical as inviting the NAACP to an on-air watermelon-eating contest.

We love when Weekday tries new tricks, remember their "radio mimes?" This one, however, sent us scurrying for Dave & Luke (KIROFM m-f, 9a-12p).

(We have been known to occasionally be a-pluckin' a plectrum with a clawhammer... however, we do it in private, our children don't even know we know all the words to Where Have All the Flowers Gone. Folksingers should be seen, not heard. On second thought- we don't want to look at them either).

Comments

[Pete]

The same folks who did This is Spinal Tap! came out with a hysterically funny mockudrama a few years ago of a folk singers' reunion, called A Mighty Wind, that's really all you ever needed to know about folk singers. The Howard Zinn-fest would have fit right in.

[chance]

Folksingers invaded our picnic at Marymoor over the weekend. We fought back by turning up our car radio, but eventually had to leave the park. I'm still trying to explain folk music to my grandchildren who are trying to deal with the experience.

[Monteray Bay]

Dont cast nasturtiums at Pete Seeger, thank you very much.

[AprilMayJune]

I wish I hadn't seen the video; radio is not pretty.

[howieinseattle]

Steve has a face for radio.

[joanie]

Or the Weavers of which Seeger was a member. Didn't we have a Purple Door (or was it just The Door) in downtown Seattle in the seventies? Folk singing is an art that can rise to the heavens or be really, really bad.