Down Home Dairyland (review)

Down Home Dairyland was originally cast as a series of 40 half-hour radio programs on traditional and ethnic music of the Wisconsin area and the Upper Midwest that aired over Wisconsin Public Radio between 1989 and 1992. It is also a "close to the heart" collaboration of James P. Leary, a faculty associate of the Folklore Program and the Department of Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Richard March, the Traditional Arts and Ethnic Arts coordinator for the Wisconsin Arts Board. Leary and March originally met in the 1970s while they were Indiana State University doctoral students in folklore. They note that they both have a long history of bringing traditional musicians to the public by way of folk festivals, concerts, recordings, publications, and similar projects and events. Radio, however, offered the two a more compatible and enduring means of delivery, as well as a broader audience base.

When Leary and March first aired the Down Home Dairyland radio program over Wisconsin Public Radio in 1989, they intended to do just 13 installments. An earlier conceptual version had been done by Richard March in 1986 on another local radio station, WORT. It was through Wisconsin Public Radio, however, that the producer-authors developed a wide listening audience. Two additional installments consisting of 13 segments, which aired in 1990, and 14 installments, which aired in 1992, firmly rooted the program within the region. By 1992, the program had gained such popularity that it moved to a 52-week format. The authors note that, as of 1995, they had produced an additional 125 programs—but in a shorter, 25-minute format with fewer interview segments and more on-air commentary.

Part of the appeal of Down Home Dairyland comes from the abundance of material Leary and March incorporate into each program. Listeners can expect interviews with traditional musicians, sample sound recordings (often of the musicians they are highlighting), and much discussion of the patterns that typify specific musical styles in the region.

Leary and March point out that "radio more than any other medium has encompassed the musical pluralism of the Upper Midwest" (p. ix). For example, Wisconsin Radio, founded in 1917, had by the 1920s begun to air traditional music. Many radio stations in the Upper Midwest have traditionally reached out to the local community, giving performers from the region an opportunity to reach their own audiences, thereby expanding radio's listening base.

In compiling the first 40 Down Home Dairyland programs as a package for purchase, Leary and March have taken their own innovative approach to bringing folk music and traditional musicians to the public just one step further. By packaging the series in a format that makes it available to a much wider audience, the authors aim to fill a void in the public's knowledge of Upper Midwestern folk music traditions. They note, for example, that at the Festival of American Folklife produced by the Smithsonian Institution and held in Washington, D.C., during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations, in terms of folk music traditions, this particular region of the United States was "terra incognita." Yet, as Leary and March point out, the Upper Midwest is a repository for folk music "as rich and complex as that found anywhere in the United States" (p. ix).

As the listener soon discovers, there is no shortage of material. Leary and March devote programs to the Woodland Indian cultures, enclaves of European immigrants from Belgium, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Slavic countries, Sweden, Switzerland, as well as African Americans and Mexican Americans. As the authors observe, "Their music has become the region's music, and the region's music has much to tell about the American experience." In listening to the tapes, it is easy to see why the radio program has met with so much success. Typically, each Down Home Dairyland tape includes a sampling of a musical style and lots of demonstration material by the musicians...