HV073- Home Team

Hearing Voices from NPR®
073 Home Team: For World Series Season
Host: Gwen Macsai of WBEZ Re:sound
Airs week of: 2011-10-12 (Originally: 2009-10-21)

“Home Team” (52:00 mp3):

For the weeks of the Conference Championships and World Series, baseball stories from the Public Radio Hall of Fame:

The sounds of a St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball game are combined with the echoes of Scott Joplin’s ragtime and the distinctive calls of Bushy Wushy the Beer Man. This 39-year veteran beer vendor at Busch Stadium, he shares his love for the game, the crowd, and the communal spirit of St. Louis. Commissioned by Continental Harmony, a partnership of America Composers Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the White House Millennium Council. Performed by Equinox Chamber Players, who premiered the work in their hometown of St. Louis.

Our “Home Team” guest host goes to games at her local minor league stadium, in Prince William, Virginia. After hearing the a host of different folk try to sing the Star-Spangled Banner there, she figures she could do better. That’s where the trouble begins.

At the Helena Brewers ballpark in Montana, teens and early twenty-somethings get their first, and for most their only, taste of playing of pro baseball.

The fictionalized history of two people: a man born in the late 1800s who runs away from home to play baseball, and a woman born in the early 1900s in a half-dugout (a small house partially built into the side of a slope or hill), who grows up to be a piano player and a beautician. Told by Terry Allen, Jo Harvey Allen, and Katie Koontz, with music by Terry Allen. Commissioned in 1993 by New American Radio. (“Radio Memories” self-interview with Terry Allen.)

HV053- Ranchers

Hearing Voices from NPR®
053 Ranchers: Life, Death, Land, and Livestock
Host: Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airs week of: 2011-02-09 (Originally: 2009-03-18)

“Ranchers” (52:00 mp3):

Cattle and sheep, wool and meat:

Our host documents a year on a Roxanne Linderman’s Montana sheep ranch, raising, lambing, herding, shearing, and selling sheep.

Click thru our audio-viz gallery of sheep-shearer Jerry Iverson’s ranch paintings.

Composer Phillip Bimstien made music with the voice of his neighbor, a Rockville, Utah cattleman, in “Garland Hirschi’s Cows,” (Starkland 1997).

Lili Olsen, 3-years-old, takes us around her New Hampshire farm, recorded by Jason Rayles.

The late Attilio Genasci, interviewed for this story at age 97, held onto his California alpine-valley cattle ranch. Produced for the Nature Conservancy’s Stories from Heart of the Land and Saving the Sierra.

HV084- Place Your Bets

Hearing Voices from NPR®
084 Place Your Bets: What Happens in Vegas
Host: Alex Chadwick of Conservation Sound
Airs week of: 2011-01-26 (Originally: 2010-02-17)

“Place Your Bets” (52:00 mp3):

We play keno, cards and craps in Sin City:

Up all night in America’s gambling Mecca: Vegas, baby.

A classical composition, in three parts, for strings, winds, and an interview with Tom Martinet, who trained to be a priest, but, instead, started working Nevada dice tables. Premiered 1997 in Vegas, performed by Sierra Wind Quintet. Re-released on PKB’s 2006 Larkin Gifford’s Harmonica.

An NPR hosts pits his wits against the regulars at a downtown small-town casino. Guess who wins. Produced by Carolyn Jensen; sound engineer by Michael Schweppe.

An excerpt from Joe’s hour “Zen” in his series The Other Side. What happened in Vegas… definitely didn’t stay in Vegas. Getting on the wrong side of Sin City’s collection crew.

Jazz bassist Kelly Roberti (David Murray Quintet) lost his bass to the keno machines. He kicked the habit; the scars remain, but the bass is back. Kelly was a 2010 Governor’s Arts Awards winner.

A radio drama written for Ridley’s 2001 LA Series on NPR Morning Edition. Performers are Bob Wisdom, Yang Chee, and Jim Wallace (script).

Above photo of the Las Vegas sign by Kcferret, June 2005.

HV037- Prison

Hearing Voices from NPR®
037 Prison: Life Behind Bars
Host: Joe Richman of Radio Diaries
Airs week of: 2010-03-17 (Originally: 2008-11-12)

“Prison” (52:00 mp3):

A Prison Diary (2001 CD | NPR series) from a former Polk Youth Institution, North Carolina. Former inmate. John Mills is out now and co-hosts our hour with Prison Dairies producer Joe Richman. (Check the accompanying Picture Projects 360 Degrees, a multimedia “Perspectives on the U.S. Criminal Justice System.”

Voices and sounds of youth in at Utah’s Washington County Crisis Center, a techno tone poem. Handcuffs, metal detectors and slamming cell doors are striking musical instruments, and incarcerated teenagers in this streetwise chorus. (PBK: site | space.)

Payton Smith’s calls her mom in prison with some questions, produced with Transom.

Another Prison Diary from Sergeant Furman Camel, a guard at Polk Youth Institution, North Carolina.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola Prison, is a sprawling old plantation on the Mississippi River. Angola holds more than five-thousand prisoners, mostly African Americans. Unless they’re pardoned by the Governor, lifers know they will never again see the outside world — that they will die inside Angola prison. Producer: David Isay with Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg; mix engineer: Anna Maria deFrietas.