This Backroads and Banjos segment is devoted to the music of little known banjo player Omer Forster. Forster was a Tennessee musician who developed his own two-finger style of picking the banjo that made for a very clean tone and great precision on the in

For this segment of Backroads and Banjos, Art brings along his friend and fiddle great Earl Murphy for a session featuring Earl on fiddle and Art on guitar and banjo. Between songs, Earl recalls some of his time on the radio in the 1930s and 1940s, his mu

In honor of The Art Show taking place at the Hotel Indigo in Athens, Art discusses how the field recorder/musician aspect of his work crosses over into the world of the paintings and murals he creates as a visual artist. The event will feature many of hi

The subject of this airing of Backroads and Banjos is the jug band, a genre not always well-received by the musical world, which originated in the late nineteenth century and was most popular in the seedier areas of society. This type of music is made by

While Art was still in college in the late 1950s, he went to work at a resort in Michigan one summer and befriended some migrant worker families on nearby Allegan Farm. In this segment, Art reminisces about the time he spent with these people, his first e

This segment focuses on Texas-born blues and spiritual singer Blind Willie Johnson. Oftentimes blues and spiritual music were kept apart with a clear differentiation between the secular and religious, but Blind Willie Johnson melds the two together with

On this Backroads and Banjos, Art presents selections from a downstate Illinois old-time band called the New Mules. New Mules are a string band whose focus is mainly on the old-time music of the lower Midwest, particularly that from downstate Illinois. Ar

On this Backroads and Banjos, Art and guitarist Pat Shields join 93-yr old fiddler Earl Murphy in his kitchen to play a couple of traditional songs as well as Pat’s original tune, These Old Green Hills, that addresses the issue of strip mining and mount

For this Backroads and Banjos segment, Art decided he wanted to showcase material that he regards as some of the finest recordings of early American roots music. Famed field recorders Alan and John Lomax put together a compilation entitled Afro-American

While a lot of episodes of Backroads and Banjos feature archival recordings of legendary old-timey recording artists, none have featured recordings quite like this. In 1959, a much younger Art Rosenbaum was the host of the radio show Keys to the Highway