Monday, January 2, 2023 at 7pm
Silky smooth harmonies echo forth from 88.1 WVPE as Melissa Carper, Rebecca Patek, and Brennan Leigh hold court on the Wild Rose Moon Radio Hour. These women are seasoned veterans of the southern music scene and they render the wonderfully nostalgic songs off Melissa’s new album, Daddy’s Country Gold, with effortless grace.
Tonally, the songs are matched to the bygone era of jazzy fiddle, thumpy stand-up bass, and tenderized guitar leads that pull the listener in and take them down the road to simpler times. Songs like, “Hey Babe, Would You Like to Get Some Goats,” are exactly what they seem to be, namely, a simple way of asking for love and companionship. “My Old Chevy Van,” celebrates the love of the old family car, while “Makin’ Memories,” proves a reality-based list of experiences that naturally pull two people together.
During the break on the show, Wild Rose Moon regulars, Pam Gunterman and Matt Scutchfield collaborate, delivering poems from award-winning Ohio Poet, Barbara Sabol, appropriate to the throwback theme. With Scutchfield chiming in throughout on his inventive cello or his exotic theremin, Gunterman starts the biographical piece, “I’m from a one-way bus ticket . . . factory works, ironworks, a dusty smoke-stacked skyline . . .I’m from compound bow versus five-point buck—hunting season trumps school . . . I’m from backyard gardens, sheets on the line—the ham steak special at the Tic Toc Diner.”
And so it goes, back into time, until Sabol’s reminiscences take us fittingly into a song from Bennan Leigh, “A Prairie Funeral,” off of her critically acclaimed album, Prairie Love Letter. She sings, “That was long ago and the years go by and I still forget he’s gone, but as I look out on the open plains I know his soul lives on – he’s the red sky mirrored on the lake, he’s the first cold light of dawn – he’s a coyote’s wail, he’s a winter storm, he’s the August wind blowing through the corn.”
Inch by listening inch, this program makes you believe that music and time travel have just a whole lot in common. H.G. Wells, eat your heart out. Melissa Carper and Company have conjured up a time machine. (This is a repeat performance)