Peter McElhinney at Style Weekly takes us on a retroactive visit through the Chickahominy Swamp and the voice and mind and sounds of the late Richmond music legend Page Wilson. The new online radio station, The Breeze, has begun airing old episodes of Wilson’s weekly visit to his porch in the swamp (which was actually recorded in a music/radio studio but sounded like you were out there.
The new edition, “The Swamp Sessions,” includes an eclectic mix of roots-influenced artists, including the Sun Rhythm Section, James McMurtry, the Irish-superstar Clancy Brothers, local hero Robbin Thompson, and more. Their relaxed conversations and playing were gingerly restored from reel-to-reel tapes.
The entertaining mix of talk and live songs was recorded between 1989 and 1992 for Wilson’s local public radio show, “The Out O’ the Blue Radio Revue,” which ran from the 1990s to the early 2000s on WCVE radio.
The original show was a slice of Americana already a bit retro in its day, a fashion-defying mix of Garrison Keillor’s similarly folksy “Prairie Home Companion” and Wolfman Jack’s midnight pirate station swagger. A lot of the artists who appeared on the shows, like legendary singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt and guitarist Tony Rice – are gone. Others, like Mary Chapin Carpenter, are still touring.
“It was interesting to see how many of them, to varying degrees, played along with the whole swamp thing,” says former local radio personality Tim Timberlake, who has been editing the raw tapes into coherent programs. The setup was theater, but the food and the fellowship was real. “It was the same thing every time,” Timberlake says. “But it was different from anything else.”
The conversations were never meant to be heard in their entirety. Usually an hour or more would be chopped down to just a bit of talk and a song or two that would be inserted into a two-hour program. The new shows are moderately deep dives into the unheard portions.
That is the truth, given today’s world of unlimited streaming and podcasts. Don’t get me wrong, streaming allows you to discover artists you would never hear in the old radio format, but Wilson’s approach was as folksy as it gets and you would always learn something new and discover artists you had never heard.
Wilson’s vintage “pure-bred American mongrel” mix of blues and bluegrass and folk and Cajun, reveled in its aura of being made for an intimate audience. For years, Timberlake says, that made it destination listening for listeners not heading out on a Saturday night.
Republished with permission from RVA 5×5.