Sterling 1963 Bluegrass Radio Broadcasts Surface on CD
Sterling 1963 bluegrass radio broadcasts surface on CD Posted in American Back Roads, Articles | Tags: Acoustic Disc, Bill Monroe, bluegrass, Carter Family, Chubby Wise, David Grisman, David Nelson, Don Reno, Ernest Tubb, Flatt & Scruggs, Folkways Records, Frank Wakefield, Good Old Boys, grateful dead, Greenbriar Boys, hank williams, Linda Ronstadt, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Pat Campbell, Patuxent Records, Pete Kuykendall, Red Allen, Round Records, Smithsonian Folkways, The WDON Recordings 1963, Tom Morgan, WDON April 22, 2015 | Bruce Sylvester By Bruce Sylvester RED ALLEN AND FRANK WAKEFIELD: The WDON Recordings 1963 Patuxent 258 www.pxrec.com Back in the 1960s, when I was a radio-dial-surfing teenager in the Washington, DC, area, I often roamed up to WDON at 1540 AM. The station educated me in country music. Now, after five decades on the shelf, Frank Wakefield and Red Allen’s The WDON Recordings 1963 (Patuxent) presents 22 broadcast songs by bluegrass legends Wakefield (mandolin, vocal) and Allen (guitar, vocal) backed by Tom Morgan on doghouse bass and Pete Kuykendall on banjo. They were aired about the time when the hard-driving musical style pioneered by Bill Monroe was first being labeled bluegrass. The disc’s audio quality is strong. Not surprisingly, it repeats a few songs found on Red Allen: The Folkways Years 1964-1993 Featuring Frank Wakefield (on Smithsonian Folkways) or the duo’s informal 1963 The Kitchen Tapes (on mandolinist David Grisman’s label, Acoustic Disc). After all, only the Folkways sessions were originally meant to be commercially released on disc. All three CDs’ covers seem to be based on the same photo shoot.
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