'I'm certainly not in any way tired of the music'

Folk music aficionado Bob Blackman, host of the “The Folk Tradition” on WKAR-FM, has been a valued part of the Lansing folk scene since he first started spinning American folk vinyl at the East Lansing station in 1974. 

On Sunday, his final show will air at 6 p.m. on WKAR, featuring Blackman’s favorite singers and musicians — the ones who’ve inspired his love of folk music over the years. As for his reasons for ending “The Folk Tradition,” Blackman said it was just time to move on and spend more time with his family. 

Blackman, 58, a computer programmer by day, was also a key player in founding the Ten Pound Fiddle series, as well as choosing talent for the Great Lakes Folk Festival in East Lansing. For him, radio was always a passion and a hobby. 

Replacing Blackman’s show will be “Folk Alley,” a nationally syndicated show hosted by Jim Blum, based in Kent, Ohio. 

Blackman recently talked about the history of his popular folk show.

How has folk music changed over the years since you started your show?

“There was a time when bluegrass musicians played strict bluegrass and Irish musicians played strictly Irish music, and people who sang traditional folk songs did that. Gradually, musicians have realized that there’s no need to stick within a particular box, and so there’s been all this cross-fertilization where bluegrass musicians and Irish musicians will get together and play some sort of hybrid of the two, and they’ll join forces on an album or for a concert. That’s really fun, and I enjoy that. As a result of those kinds of changes, the range of music that I play on the show has certainly widened over the decades because my taste has changed. It’s still what I would call ‘folk music,’ under a very general definition, but it’s not as strictly acoustic musicians playing old songs, as it was in the early days.”

How has radio changed in the time since you started?

“Certainly at WKAR it’s gotten much more professional, much more organized. National Public Radio has grown into this huge network, and there are other public radio networks as well, from which we get programs. So far more of our content comes from a national source rather than being produced locally at the station, and I think that’s probably true around the country.”

Do you remember which records you were playing when you first started out?

“I played a lot of Pete Seeger and some of the anti-war singer/songwriters, the protest singers who were still active in the 1970s: Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan. Groups like Peter, Paul and Mary were a big influence on me in the early days. It was a more gradual thing for me to begin embracing bluegrass, or to become interested in Irish music or blues. As time went on, I would start listening to some new branch of the music and get interested in it and begin incorporating it into the show. The show evolved along with my own musical taste over the years.”

When you started radio, there were probably some Vietnam protest songs happening.

“Yeah, that’s right, because when I was in college it was still going on, but it was starting to wind down. I was class of 1975 here at Michigan State, and it was right around that time, so those kinds of songs were still very popular. And even after the war itself ended there were still all kinds of other protest songs: civil rights songs, the beginning of the ecology movement, the women’s movement — they all generated lots of songs as well. So that was two of the big threads in folk music at that time: the protest singers, like Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, and the people who were listening to old traditional songs, what you might think of as real folk songs that went back for generations.” 

Are there as many protest songs now about the Iraq war? 

“Not nearly as much. I think there were some, but for whatever reason not as much. There are certainly pockets of topical songwriters who are still creating music about the war in Iraq, about the ecology movement, about global warming, about working people’s struggles. It seems to be more under the radar than it was back then. During the 1960s and into the 1970s, if you thought about folk music you probably thought about protest music first. That was almost the quintessential folk music of the day. I think now it’s a much broader palette, and protest music is not as obvious a part of it, although it is certainly still a part of it.”

Why did you decide to call quits with the show?

“There are other things at this point that I want to spend some of my weekend time doing. And because the show is a hobby and it’s not how I make a living, I just hit a point where I didn’t want to spend my whole weekend working on the show, as I have all these years. I spend close to 15 hours over the weekends on my show in one way or another. And even though it’s pleasant work, I just need to find time to do some other things. I’m certainly not in any way tired of the music, and I love radio. But I just hit a point where I felt like I was ready to move on and do something else.”