10 p.m. to Midnight Host: Steve Winters
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This program’s first part marked the passing this month of the English folksinger known for most of his life as Louis Killen and of Cowboy Jack Clement and celebrated bluegrass star George Shuffler’s election to the Bill Monroe Bluegrass Hall of Fame. The remainder featured performers from or formerly from Connecticut.
With a bawdy style and a booming but lyrical tenor, Louis Killen, who died at age 79, was a mainstay of the 1950s English folk revival and one of folk music’s great influential ballad singers, researching and performing music that chronicled the working lives of seamen, coal miners, mill workers and common laborers. He enjoyed a career that saw him move to America in 1966 and become enlisted, with many other performers, on the maiden crew of Pete Seeger’s Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. He performed for six years with the Clancy Brothers, replacing Tommy Makem who had departed the group. He contributed to more than 60 albums in 50 years of performing, including more than a dozen solo albums. He surprised fans in 2010 by deciding to live as a woman and two years later underwent a sex-change operation. Cowboy Jack Clement was a Nashville music legend and true character. He didn’t record much but he contributed mightily as a jack-of-all-trades in the music business, including being a successful producer, arranger and songwriter. In 1963, he produced Johnny Cash’s signature hit, “Ring of Fire.”, a Grammy Hall of Fame recording. He was to be officially inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Oct. 27 along with Kenny Rogers and Bobby Bare.
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