One Half Buddhist, One Half Christian, One Half Pagan

Only somebody from the UK would refer to "the Detroit, Chicago, Boston area."

(I'm sure Americans make similarly silly statements about Europe all the time. This just jumped out at me.)

Even at age 84, a Doc Watson concert is a wonderful thing.

My favorite bit was about an hour and a half in, when he did a medley of some early rock'n'roll hits: Blue Suede Shoes/Tutti Frutti/and a few others.

Songs that are so long that they never get played on the radio, or even in most music podcasts.

Call the show "Long Songs" and every episode play five or six songs, all of which are at least 10 minutes long. I'd shoot for a total length of between 60 and 90 minutes. All genres except classical (because long pieces are fairly standard for classical music.)

I listen to this podcast because it makes me step out of my musical comfort zone. 45% of the time I listen and go "that's pretty cool" and add the artist to my Amazon wishlist. 45% of the time I go "eh, not my thing, but not awful." The remaining 10% is stuff like this, especially the first song in the set:

Video: Micachu At SXSW : NPR Music

WHY PLAY SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS THAT AWFUL?!?! I want that part of my brain back.

Smithsonian Folkways - The Folkways Collection

An amazing series exploring the 60+ year history of the Folkways record label.

Every episode I've heard is wonderful, but my favorite so far is "Episode 13: Music and the Winds of Change: The Labor Movement"

His most recent podcast ("I Want Your Sax") is, to my ear, a total disaster.

It's a music episode, and features lots of "great" jazz saxophones. Most of the tracks sound like someone was tickling the saxophonist, and the one I'm listening to now sounds like someone hooked a sax up to the bag from a set of bagpipes and then started jumping up and down on it.

Blah. There's a reason my favorite jazz is from the Big Band era.

I'm currently listening to Billy Bragg sing a duet of Johnny Cash's song "I Still Miss Someone" with Rosanne Cash. Amazing!

It's the November 21 performance of Mountain Stage.

I'll try to find and post a link directly to the episode if anyone is interested.

For me, half the fun of finding something cool is in telling other people about it. To make it easier for me to recommend podcasts, I made a spreadsheet of all the ones I listen to, with the title, a description, and a link. At first my plan was to just have it for when I wanted to recommend a specific show to a specific person. Today though, I decided to make the whole list available to anyone who's interested.

My Recommended Podcasts

Unfortunately, you don't seem to be able to re-sort the list on that page, so you are limited to however I sorted it the last time I made any changes.

Can anybody out there on the interwebs recommend a good filk music podcast? Or a good funny music podcast?

If it helps to calibrate my sense of humor/taste: I love Michael Longcor, Heather Alexander, Weird Al, and intelligent humor; hate The Jerky Boys and similarly crude humor; and am neutral to slightly negative on Star Wars and Star Trek.

One of the podcasts I've been listening to lately is TransAtlantic Acoustic Show. They play a really good mix of British and American folk, Celtic, and other traditional music. The problem is that the hosts annoy the heck out of me. I can't decide if I should keep listening to it or not.