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Music scholar and radio personality Dick Spottswood highlights the many facets of Folk Culture in the United States each Sunday afternoon from 1 to 3 pm. Dick is a collector, researcher, author and passionate spokesman for American music. Subtitled the "Obsolete Music Hour," each program brings listeners a surprising variety of early styles - string bands, jug bands, jazz bands, western swing outfits, gospel choirs and more, derived from original cylinders, compact discs, and everything in between.

As Dick explains, "I might play contrasting versions of a song, or take a single theme and pursue it through different compositions, showing how music has evolved along with it. It's old music and it can sound strange on initial encounter but, as we develop mental time-travel gear, we discover the delights of imagining ourselves in earlier, less complicated times, when many of us still lived on farms, and when diversions like radios, telephones, automobiles, movies were just beginning to shrink our planet and change our lives."

Dick's playlist reaches back to the 1890s and the beginnings of recorded sound, but he concentrates on music from the 1920s through the 1950s, when the industry was still capturing regional music in place and recording units were travelling to towns in the south and southwest, preserving the flavor of local music. Soon the industrial process would imprint music with its bottom-line need to market fewer varieties of music to larger audiences, acquiring the power to dictate how music would be disseminated, homogenized and consumed on a national basis. Dick is realistic about being unable to turn back the hands of time, but he still enjoys sharing early recordings of less sophisticated music and creating the illusion of returning to the past, if only for a couple of hours each week.

For a unique musical experience, join Dick Sunday afternoons on 88.5 fm at 1 p.m. Or, if you just can't get enough of the obsolete, listen in throughout the week to Dick's special broadcasts on our Internet radio station BluegrassCountry.org.