93.3 CFMU Weekend Wake Up (2025)

11/01/2025

next show saturday 8am eastern.
feature on Molly Johnson

30/12/2024

Remembering Josh White Jr., who passed away Friday night. Mary Stanfield Finkelstein and I were honored to meet Josh at Folk Alliance International in Kansas City, and I last saw him at the 2023 Blues Music Awards in Memphis. Josh was a renowned performer, delighting audiences with his own music and that of his father, the singer, songwriter, actor and civil rights activist Josh White.

When I was 7 years old, my Mother played Josh White’s 1944 version of “Strange Fruit,” based on a poem by Abel Meeropol about the the lynching of African Americans. She used this powerful song (first made famous by Billie Holiday) to explain to me the horrors of racial discrimination.

In 2013, when I first interviewed David Crosby for Blues Radio International, I discovered that his Mother— who did not know mine—played the same track to teach him the same lesson.

It made a powerful and enduring impression on me. And on David Crosby:

“She once played me a Josh White recording called ‘Strange Fruit’, and I couldn’t understand what it was about. When I asked her, she started crying and sat me down and explained it was Black people being hung from trees in the South.”
“Learning the word ‘lynching’ was my introduction to racism. I was a little kid, and it scared me, as I didn’t know human beings did that to each other.”
Thank you, Josh White, Jr., and to your Father, Josh White. You touched, and changed the lives, of many, in so many ways.

Photograph: May 11, 2023, Blues Music Awards, Memphis.

11/11/2024

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93.3 CFMU Weekend Wake Up