TERRELL'S SOUNDWORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, July 10, 2005
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
Now Webcasting
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Let it Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Black Tongue by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Journey to the Center of Mind by The Ramones
Is it My Body? by Alice Cooper
Blue Orchid by The White Stripes
Entertain by Sleater-Kinney
Sheela Na-Gig by P.J. Harvey
The Mystery of Love by Marianne Faithful
It's So Hard by John Lennon
Anna by Aurthur Alexander

Rock Show by Iggy Pop
Are We the Waiting by Green Day
Jubilee by Patti Smith
My Friend Goo by Sonic Youth
I Want to See You Belly Dance by The Red Elvises
The Slim by Sugar
Santana, Castanada & You by Giant Sand
Bridget the Midget by Ray Stevens

HOWLIN' WOLF vs. SON HOUSE
House Rockin' Boogey by Howlin' Wolf
Death Letter Blues by Son House
Built For Comfort by Howlin' Wolf
Preachin' Blues by Son House
Spoonful by The Super Super Blues Band
John the Revelator by Son House
Coon on the Moon by Howlin' Wolf

Just Like Greta by Van Morrison
No Time to Think by Bob Dylan
Have You Seen the Stars Tonight by Paul Kanter & The Jefferson Starship
Forever Changed by Bobby Purify
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, July 8, 2005
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Now Webcasting
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
Bandages and Scars by Son Volt
Lincoln Town car by The Waco Brothers
Virgin of the Cobra by Kev Russell
Lonesome Valley by Jon Dee Graham
Whiskey in a Jar by Hazeldine
Rated X by Neko Case
Rainbow Stew by Jason Ringenberg
Dumb Blonde by Dolly Parton
Track 2 by Charlie Tweddle

A Cigarette, A Bottle and a Jukebox by Big Al Downing
Just Between You and Me by Charlie Pride
Blame the Vain by Dwight Yoakam
Hey Bartender by Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks
I Just Lost My Mind by Rex Hobart & The Misery Boys
Wayside/Back in Time by Gillian Welch
Drunkards Go to Hell by Foddershock
Misty by Ray Stevens

I'm Working on a Building by Bill Monroe & The Bluegrass Boys
I'm Working on a Road by Flatt & Scruggs
Propiniquity by Earl Scruggs with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Dark Hollow by David Bromberg
Are You Washed in the Blood by Red Allen
I'm Not a Communist by Grandpa Jones
Grapevine by Tom Russell
A Summer Love Song by Dr. West's Medicine Show & Junk Band
Cover of the Rolling Stone by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show

Don't Get me Started by Rodney Crowell
Baghdad by Ed Pettersen
Out of Line by Michael Martin Murphey
Belshazzer by Johnny Cash
The Bloody Bucket by Grey DeLisle
A Whorehouse is Any House by Bonny Prince Billy
It Sure Was Good by George Jones & Tammy Wynette
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: NOW HERE'S A MAN WITH THE BLUES

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
July 8, 2005

It’s a sad confrontation, a clash of the titans that nobody wanted to see.

The scene is backstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966. Ethnomusicologist and folk music heavyweight Alan Lomax, who brought several old Mississippi blues greats from the ‘20s and ‘30s to the show, had set up what he called a “juke joint” backstage where he filmed informal performances.

Son House, one of the most venerated of all the early bluesmen was there. He’s drunk and belligerent and he‘s made the mistake of interrupting the performance of Howlin‘ Wolf, the Mississippi-born Chicago bluesman, who was more of a demiurge than an entertainer.

At first Wolf tries to joke with House, who had been one of his mentors back in the Delta. “Now here’s a man with the blues,” Wolf growls.

But when House doesn’t stop, the Wolf pounces. “You had a chance with your life, but you ain’t done nothing’ with it,” he says. “You don’t love but one thing, and that’s some whiskey.”

This was captured on film and is, in fact the most intense moment in Don McGlynn’s 2003 documentary The Howlin' Wolf Story: The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll, which is showing Saturday and Wednesday at Santa Fe Film Center.

There’s lots to like about this film. One of my favorite parts is the home movie footage from Wolf drummer Sam Lay’s camera of 1960s gigs at long-gone Chicago joints like Sylvio’s -- where you can spot Chicago blues royalty like Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter in the audience.

But the scene that keeps haunting me is the one with Son House. It’s hard to watch and embarrassing to everyone involved, including present-day viewers. The hard fact is Wolf is right.

House, who was eight years older than Wolf, had lived an archetypal blues life. He’d been a traveling troubadour, a preacher and a hobo. In his early years he’d killed a guy and served time in the infamous Parchman prison. He had a brief recording career in the ‘30s, then disappeared until 1941 when Lomax tracked him down, then disappeared again until the early ‘60s when folkie revivalists “rediscovered” him. House had spent most of those missing years working as a Pullman porter in Rochester, N.Y.

Wolf, born Chester Burnett, on the other hand, never turned his back on his music. Learning guitar from none other than Delta blues founding father Charlie Patton himself, Wolf went to West Memphis, Ark., where he hooked up with Sun Records’ Sam Phillips, then to Chicago, where, along with his friend and rival Muddy Waters, he pioneered electric blues.

His music and his wild stage persona personified the rough and raucous spirit of the blues, but, as becomes apparent in McGlynn’s film, he was a hard-working, big-hearted conscientious man — which counters the blues stereotype.

He paid unemployment insurance for his band, even back in the ‘50s. He was a family man. His grown daughters recall how he bought them back fancy clothes when he toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival. He was intent on self improvement, taking classes to learn to read and write when he was in his ‘50s and even taking music lessons to improve his guitar playing.

Like most the bluesmen we know and love from that era, Wolf was born under the bad signs of extreme poverty and racial oppression. His own mother, a religious fanatic, threw him out of the house as a child of 13. (In the film his longtime guitarist Hubert Sumlin tells how Wolf, while touring Mississippi, came across his mother. He tried to give her some money, but she threw it on the ground and stomp on it. She didn’t want any money that came from the Devil’s music.)

So when Wolf tells Son House, “You had a chance with your life, but you ain’t done nothing’ with it,” it’s coming from the realization that he could have ended up like House -- drunk, broke and living on past glories -- had he not worked so hard.

The Howlin' Wolf Story will show at The Santa Fe Film Center at Cinemacafe, 1616 St. Michael's Drive 4 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Tickets are Tickets $8; $7 for students and seniors; $6 for film festival members.

Also Recommended:

* Blues With a Message by Various Artists. In the minds of too many modern fans, blues is nothing but party music, celebrating drinking, fighting, gambling and -- especially -- skirt-chasing.

But besides other mules kicking in his stall, sometimes the wolf knocks at a bluesman’s doors. In other words, besides the songs about drinking and fornicating, there’s also a tradition of socially conscious blues tunes.

Blues with a Message is a collection of 18 songs that deal with issues of poverty, racism, war, prison and even one medical epidemic (“The 1919 Influenza Blues” by pianist/singer Essie Jenkins.)

The artists represented here are mainly older acoustic players, such as former Mississippi Sheik Sam Chatman, who sings about racial stereotypes in “I Have to Paint My Face” and former inmate Robert Pete Williams, who tells a long sad tale called “Prisoner’s Talking Blues”

There’s also some electric blues, such as Juke Boy Bonner’s “What Will I Tell the Children,” (“Listened, looked around all day for a job/and I looked almost every place/It’s hard to come home and find hunger on your children’s face.”) and “Little Soldier Boy” a Korean War-era song by a Detroit singer named Doctor Ross.

One of the most uplifting songs here is “Why I Like Roosevelt” by sacred steel icon Willie Eason. He praises FDR (“Racial prejudice he tried to rule out/Invited Negro leaders to the White House …) while recalling the dark days of his predecessor (“After Hoover had made the poor man moan Roosevelt stepped in, they was a comfortable home.”)

SHIELDING REPORTERS

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown has a good piece about reporters and anonymous sources relevant to the Judith Miller case -- and, by extension, the Wen Ho Four (see my column immediately below.)

Like Brown, I have off-the-record/don't-use-my-name conversations practically every day, though I've never been jailed for protecting a source. The closest I came was a couple of years ago at a trial that resulted from a lengthy murder investigation I'd covered for about 10 years.

This was "The Rosebush Case," in which a human skeleton had been unearthed from the back yard of an east-side Santa Fe home when the homeowner was transplanting a rosebush. DNA eventually linked the remains to a former owner of the house.

For more than a year before the trial, I had been in e-mail contact with a former employee of the suspect's. I never wrote anything based on those e-mails. At that point the suspect, an Oklahoma man, hadn't even been charged. My correspondence was all just for background.

Eventually the former employee went to the police with her story. In the interviews, she mentioned her e-mails to me. When her former boss went to trial, the defense attorney claimed that I had tried to "program" the witness (I can barely program a VCR!) to believe her former boss was guilty of the murder.

The defense attorney wanted copies of all our e-mail. I refused to give it to him. I got subpoenaed as a witness and thus not allowed into the courtroom for a day or so, before The New Mexican's lawyer got it quashed.

There was a hearing before Judge Michael Vigil on whether I should be forced to give up my e-mails to the defense. Driving to the courthouse that morning, I didn't know whether I'd be spending the night -- or the next several nights -- in the Wen Ho Lee suite of the Santa Fe County Detention Center. I called my ex-wife's voice mail and left a message saying I might not be able pick up our son that weekend.

This of course wasn't the matter of giving up a source's identity. She had already identified herself and in fact had handed over copies of some of our e-mail. Still, I had promised to keep our correspondence confidential and I intended to keep that promise. Our lawyer came up with a compromise, to let Judge Vigil read the e-mails "in camera" and decided whether they should be admitted as evidence.

Vigil agreed and ruled later that day the e-mails were protected under New Mexico's shield law and wouldn't be allowed into the trial.

I got to see my son that weekend. And even without my e-mails, the defense attorney was able to get his client a not-guilty verdict.

Here's an Associated Press account my little ordeal. And here's something extremely weird about the Rosebush case.

ROUNDHOUSE ROUND-UP: BILL RICHARDSON & THE WEN HO FOUR

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
July 7, 2005

Many believe that Gov. Bill Richardson is praying that the reporters involved in the Wen Ho Lee privacy lawsuit remain as steadfast as The New York Times’ Judith Miller, who was sentenced to jail Wednesday for refusing to divulge the name of a source to a grand jury investigating the outing of an undercover CIA operative.

But some political experts interviewed Wednesday say that even if it’s revealed that Richardson leaked the name of the former Los Alamos scientist to reporters months before Lee was charged with any crime, the ultimate effect on Richardson’s political career would be minimal.

Richardson, as secretary of energy under President Clinton, fired Lee, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was under investigation of espionage. He has long suspected of leaking Lee’s name.

Richardson flatly has denied being the leaker. In a deposition for Lee’s lawsuit the governor said he didn’t remember making some statements about the Lee firing attributed to him in various newspapers.

Lee filed a lawsuit shortly after his 1999 indictment claiming officials from the Energy and Justice departments violated the privacy act of 1974 by leaking his name and other information about him to reporters.

That case came roaring back in the news last week when a federal appeals court upheld contempt citations against four reporters who refused to testify concerning confidential sources who gave then information about Lee. The court dropped a contempt charge against a fifth reporter.

That decision came one day after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Miller and Time reporter Matt Cooper, who are charged with contempt in the Valerie Plame case. Plame’s name as a CIA agent was leaked by unnamed White House sources after her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson disputed Bush administration claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa.

What the judge said: In the Wen Ho Lee decision, Appeals Judge David Sentelle singled out the names of Richardson, Acting Director of DOE Intelligence and Counterintelligence Notra Trulock and Edward Curran, former director of the DOE Office of Counterintelligence.

“These three individuals in particular had been identified as likely sources of the leaks, but were unable (or unwilling) to identify the leaker(s).”

The judge noted that one of the defendants, James Risen of The New York Times, “refused to testify as to whether Secretary Richardson disclosed Lee’s identity or information about his interrogation or prosecution to Risen.” Risen also refused to testify “whether Notra Trulock was correct in his testimony before Congress when he said that Secretary Richardson had leaked Lee’s name to Risen.” Trulock made this statement at an October 2000 hearing.

The judge also noted that another defendant Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times had refused to answer questions about alleged interviews with Richardson about Lee that involved off-the-record statements.

A Richardson spokesman said Wednesday that the governor doesn’t comment on pending lawsuits. But Billy Sparks said Richardson believes the decision will have a “chilling effect” on journalists’ right to protect confidential sources.

Who remembers?: Let’s assume a worst-case scenario: One of the Wen Ho Four, perhaps shaken by the image of Judith Miller being taken away in handcuffs, breaks down and sings like a bird, naming Richardson as his Deep Throat.

What would that do to the political career of the governor, who is seeking re-election next year and is considering a run for the presidency in 2008?

“People who wish to discredit him will hunt for possible blemishes on his record,” said UNM political science professor F. Chris Garcia.

He said such a revelation would have to be considered negative. “But I think there would be tremendous damage control measures,” Garcia said. “The governor and his staff are pretty good at that.”

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said, “The bad news (for Richardson) is that it would be an unpleasant episode for him. Some of his former colleagues, like Bill Clinton, might be unhappy with him.

“The good news is that besides you and me there’s probably only 140 in this country who remember Wen Ho Lee. Someone like Bill Richardson has overcome a lot of obstacles. He could overcome this.”