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"The Folk Tradition with Bob Blackman" 1977 - 2011
The Folk Tradition with Bob Blackman aired its final broadcast on April 24, 2011, after 27 years as a staple of 90.5 WKAR’s Sunday evening schedule.
Folk music from WKAR continues as a Sunday night tradition in mid-Michigan. The Sunday evening lineup from 90.5 FM WKAR begins at 6 p.m. with Folk Alley, a two-hour program hosted by Jim Blum from WKSU in Kent, Ohio, and continues through the evening with The Folk Sampler at 8 p.m. and Thistle and Shamrock beginning at 9 p.m.
Bob Blackman on the Air
Bob Blackman’s retirement capped over four decades behind radio microphones. Although most of that time has been at WKAR, he started in tenth grade, when he took Warren Richard’s “Radio-TV” class at East Lansing High School. That led to two years as the school’s morning announcer, plus spinning records over the P.A. system during noon hours as a member of the “D.J. Club.”
After doing some college radio, Blackman came to WKAR-AM, where his first series, The American Tradition, debuted in May 1974. He produced 45 half-hour episodes before leaving the area to attend graduate school in folklore at Indiana University. When he returned to East Lansing, Blackman resumed his relationship with WKAR and began a new series, The Folk Tradition, which ran from February 1977 until June 1981.
In the early eighties, Blackman produced a 13-week series of programs recorded at the Ten Pound Fiddle, a folk concert venue in East Lansing. With support from National Public Radio, The Ten Pound Fiddle Concerts was distributed to 40 stations around the country. The series included concerts by such artists as Utah Phillips, Robin & Linda Williams, and Claudia Schmidt.
WKAR asked Blackman to resume his weekly show in 1984, expanded to an hour and moved to Sunday evenings on WKAR-FM. That version of The Folk Tradition debuted on March 4, 1984, and aired virtually every Sunday through the final broadcast in April 2011 – almost 1400 shows.
When announcing his retirement in 2011, Blackman said, “I still love folk music and plan to continue all of my other activities in the local arts community, including my involvement with the Great Lakes Folk Festival every August, and being an occasional emcee at the Ten Pound Fiddle and other folk music venues. And, of course, I’ll always be a loyal listener and supporter of WKAR Radio, and I hope all of my fans will too!”
published: June 23, 2011
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