Following up on 2017’s Folk DJ Hall of Fame inductees Oscar Brand, Mike Regenstreif and Howard and Roz Larman, Folk Alliance International has added New England’s Dick Pleasants, who helped start the first full-time commercial folk music station, to this years hall of fame.
Steeped in the sounds of famed coffeehouses Unicorn and Club 47, Mr. Pleasants cut his folk music chops at such radio stations like WCIB-FM / Falmouth, WCAS-AM/Cambridge and WVOI-FM/Martha’s Vineyard. He furthered the folk music cause by way of his show Folk Heritage, hooking listeners with interviews and live performances with everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to The Battlefield Band to Beausoleil and included live broadcasts from the Lowell Folk Festival and inside listens into the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Mr. Pleasants would go on to wow listeners at WUMB Radio on his Guest Mix show with interviews with Rory Block, Judy Collins, Bill Stains, Richie Havens, Bill Morrissey and Michelle Shocked among others. He also had a hand in launching Summer Acoustic Music Week, helped out the Boston Folk Festival and WUMB concerts for the likes of Emmy Lou Harris, Natalie MacMaster, Suzanne Vega and Sweet Honey In the Rock. In addition, he’s one of the found members of the South Shore Music Club and Woods Hole Folk Music Club and has been a member and supporter of the Nature Connection Inc.
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
