Audio by Adam

A survey look at what being Irish is all about deep down –from the “fairy faith” to its music, to Celtic myth, to sean nos and storytelling. Collected entirely in the West of Ireland down some very very back roads.

See also “Visions and Beliefs in the West Ireland,” which focuses on the spirituality and folkways of the Irish Gaeltacht.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:34 — 14.3MB)

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The Bible says that a woman’s hair is a glory to her, and they take that quite literally at several African American beauty salons that are springing up in the Washington DC and other urban areas.  Come with me on my visit to a salon where being “born again,” amazing hair-dos and “prayerful” and joyous sisterhood intertwine in a sacred (often musical) weave.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:16 — 2.4MB)

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A sound-rich odyssey in which Adam explores various healing systems that use the plants of the rainforest for physical and spiritual healing. Includes interviews with Mayan shamans, and peasant Catholic and Creole healers.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:55 — 23.2MB)

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Adam went down to the coal-rich mountains of the southern Appalachian mountains, where “hillbillies” are presumed to live.  Through on-site interviews and a survey look at American pop culture, he examines the hillbilly stereotype, its roots and impact.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:01 — 7.3MB)

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A sound-rich look at the ways the Jews in America have influenced what Americans find funny, while expressing themselves and their take on life at the same time.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:43 — 15.8MB)

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If California were a nation of its own, it would have the twelth largest economy in the world; agriculture would be a huge percentage of it. Much of the labor that produces is done by migrant farm workers who come to the US, sometimes illegally, and follow the crops, before returning home to Mexico and places even further south. I spent some time with migrant farmworkers in California’s immense – and immensely fertile – Central Valley, and filed this report for the VOA.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:25 — 5.9MB)

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Native Americans are far more likely than their mainstream counterparts to die young and be poor along the way. This story examines, through interviews and sound, how the Blackfeet Tribe of western Montana are trying to hold on to traditional ways while bettering themselves economically.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:28 — 7.8MB)

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New York City was full of ritual, ceremony, art and other forms of creative and numinous expression in the months following September 11th. This tells the story of one old ceremony that Native Americans brought to the Museum of the American Indian, near Ground Zero after several months had elapsed. It was a ceremonial moment to mark the necessity for drying the tears and moving on.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:17 — 4.8MB)

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Art Spiegelman is most famous for his Pulitzer Prize winning work “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Nazis are portrayed as cats, and Jews are depicted as mice.  In this profile, Spiegelman talks about his roots as a Mad Magazine afficionado, underground cartoonist, and his experience growing up in a Queens NY family overshadowed by the Shoah.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:59 — 4.8MB)

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Meet David Isay, a humane and immensely talennted radio documentary maker and oral historian who has probably won every broadcasting award out there.  Isay has dedicated his career to celebrating the lives of everyday Americans by recording their stories, and chronicling the experiences of underdogs and colorful characters, many of them living outside the American cultural mainstream.  We meet him, and sample some of them, in this profile.

See also “Listening is an Act of Love” and “Storycorps” stories also in this blog.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:29 — 6.9MB)

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