Woodsongs at 1,000: How an army of volunteers have put a Monday spotlight on music
“This is what we do on Mondays.”
That’s the succinct summation Michael Johnathon uses to describe the weekly practice of creating the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. The folksinger who launched the locally produced live music and conversation series over two decades ago was back onstage at the Farish Theatre, one of several initial performance sites for WoodSongs, as the show gears up its 1,000th broadcast taping. That will happen Nov. 19 at its current home of the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center.
But tonight, with the celebration just under two weeks away, Johnathon and several of the crew chiefs that make WoodSongs happen every Monday with the help of a community-minded army of volunteers, are having a meet and greet at the Farish by swapping stories, sharing slide shows and filling folks in on a series that began as a radio show in a tiny Lexington studio but is now heard as a multi-media production around the world. It’s produced 44 Monday’s a year, airs on 537 radio stations on the American Forces Radio Network and on TV’s across the country.
Among the first topics addressed — the fact that Show 1,000 of a program known for broadcasting on Mondays, will present its milestone broadcast on a Tuesday. The switch was made to accommodate the availability of the show’s guest performers. Otherwise, WoodSongs belongs to Mondays, and vice versa.
“WoodSongs is encouraging the experience of the live and the real and the person of the artist,” Johnathon said. “Most of the crew members come as audience members first. It ignites that fuse and they want to be part of it. I mean, what’s a few hours on a Monday? What’s anybody doing on a Monday anyway, right? That’s why we do it on a Monday. Everybody’s around. This is what we do on Mondays.”
“It really is what we do,” added stage manager and artist liaison Bryan Klausing, who has been with WoodSongs for much of its history. “It’s the opportunity to work with all these artists and have the challenge of having everything done by 7 to where the audience is ready and we’re ready. It’s relaxed, it’s intense and the payoff is astounding. It’s a miracle that this thing has kept on as it has. It is something very special.”
Love of community
WoodSongs began in 1998 in a recording studio run by engineer Kevin Johnson best described as intimate — meaning it could barely accommodate a dozen patrons. Fashioned around folk-rooted performances and interviews with Johnathan serving as producer and host and Johnson as audio engineer, the program eventually landed at the Farish and later the State Theatre auditorium at the Kentucky Theatre before settling in at the Lyric in 2013.
Scores of artists famous and unknown graced its stage. Among the notables: Judy Collins, Andrew Bird, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Emmylou Harris, Tommy Emmanuel, The Mavericks, Bruce Hornsby, Jewel, John Oats, Rhonda Vincent, Preservation Hall Jazz Band and literally hundreds of others. But as distinct as the music remains, the program’s entire design is even more novel. It is run, from top to bottom, by a volunteer crew that assembles the staging, lighting and audio equipment for every broadcast and then promptly strikes it all as soon as the live show ends.
“When I started back at show 150, the thing that struck me immediately was this sense of ‘We’re all in this together,’” said chief audio engineer Jerome Gallt, who began his WoodSongs affiliation by working on the program’s initial webcasts. He took over audio duties following Johnson’s death in 2013. “It was a family kind of crew. Even though there are only two or three people that are still on the crew from then, that spirit is passed on down from volunteer to volunteer. That’s our mission. Those of us that are part of the core group, that’s our goal — to make sure the new people coming on feel welcome, feel important and feel necessary.”
“Part of this community imagery comes from friendship and kindness,” Johnathon said. “It has to start with me. I have to set the example. These are volunteers, so you treat them as friends.
“We had a crew member make a horrible mistake at one show. They forgot to press the record button. The way we responded was we sent her a bouquet of flowers and told her we thought she was wonderful. It wasn’t the end of the world, but she felt awful.
“We can accomplish so much with kindness. We have to be that way with our family and our friends. When we do something like this, that’s what holds the community together. It’s not money. It’s not contracts. It’s the emotion of wanting to do this.”
“You just find a way to do it”
Of course, at the heart of WoodSongs is the music. Show 1,000 will feature live music from a frequent guest of the show, the Grammy-winning singing cowboy quartet Riders in the Sky. But ask anyone affiliated with WoodSongs about the broadcasts that have resonated with them the most through the years and the answers will be varied in a way that only a show with such an extended and stylistically diverse history can make them.
“I would put up (blues/soul songstress) Janiva Magness,” Johnathon remarked “She’s been on six times, but this time she had just written her memoir. This is someone who tried to commit suicide by hanging herself. That’s how the broadcast began.”
“Just from a blow-my-mind standpoint was Andrew Bird the first time he came on the show (in 2003),” recalled Gallt. “He was playing, singing, whistling and using his loop pedals. He had created this symphony by the end of the song (‘Action/Adventure’). To this day, that’s still one my favorite performances.”
Klausing referenced a 2014 show featuring the orchestrally inclined pop ensemble Pink Martini. It was, by all manner of description, a big undertaking — the 16 members of Pink Martini along with the four singers of the Von Trapp family touring as guest collaborators of the group. That didn’t just mean finding space for them onstage, but locating rooms for them offstage — as in hotel lodging. Not an easy feat for a volunteer organization looking for free accommodations for a legion of musicians.
“What you had was a big group coming into Lexington that wasn’t getting paid a fee,” Klausing said. “But the local hotels were still coming to the table saying, ‘Yes, we’ll find a way to make that happen.’ That’s it. You find a way to make it happen. And I think that’s what the crew does. When there are technical problems or it’s a bigger show with bigger artists, you just find a way to do it by 7 o’clock on that Monday. No matter where you were before, the show is going to be live and it’s going to be amazing.”
WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour
What: Show 1,000, featuring Riders in the Sky
When: 6:45 p.m. Nov. 19
Where: Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center, 300 E. Third
Tickets: $35
Call: 859-280-2218
Online: lexingtonlyric.tix.com, woodsongs.com
This story was originally published November 15, 2019 at 12:36 PM.