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Brad Sondahl's Music webpages
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I woke up this morning and my mind (was set on freedom). No wait,
that's a gospel song that popped into my head when I started with "I
woke up this morning." Actually I woke up thinking I'd like to
tell whoever's interested my musical autobiography. The first
records I bought with my own money were two cut-out (discount) records
by Lightnin Hopkins--Autobiography in Blues and Coffee House Blues.
It was the title "Autobiography in Blues" that got me thinking
about my own musical autobiography (and I encourage my musical friends
to post theirs).
My earliest memories go back to
Brookings, South Dakota, and our family's small but diverse record
collection. We had some classical (including the wonderfully
strong melodies of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, the Firebird
Suite, and The Nutcracker), a Spike Jones 45 (The daring young man on
the flying trapeze and Bubblegum), as as the 60's rolled in a couple
new ones appeared, like Tom Lehrer (ate that up), musicals like
Camelot, The Music Man, and My Fair Lady, and the Dave Clark Five
(probably my brother's influence--5 years older than me and into rock
and blues). My sister was also a big influence with the few albums she
bought and left in our big console stereo--Peter Paul and Mary, The New
Christy Minstrels, and the Kingston Trio giving me a second hand
introduction to folk music; and Barbara Streisand introducing me to the
great American songbook.
We also listened a lot
to the local AM station, KBRK, which had polkas for milking by (6 Fat
Dutchmen Too Fat Polka, for instance) and music ranging from big band
to country and western. We went to the local Lutheran Church
regularly and I absorbed the great hymns from that tradition by
osmosis. That was as close to an indigenous culture for me to
soak up, so if I lack authenticity I came by it naturally. ;-)
I started to play piano around age 6--took lessons for 3 years but
never could figure out how to read music fast enough to actually play
it with both hands. So after I quit lessons I'd sometimes doink
around picking out Tijuana Brass and other melodies with my right hand.
That was my music playing experience until high school, when I
took up the harmonica...
I watched a lot of TV as
a child, absorbed music from the variety shows as well as being a fan
of the Monkees when they were assembled. The first album I asked
for and got was the Monkees album. I understand now how they
were just put together for the TV show and mostly couldn't play, but
some of their songs still sound pretty good to me... I
managed to miss the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show-- became aware of
them when other kids were singing "Yellow Submarine" in junior high, as
well as overplayed songs like "Michelle" on the radio.
I moved to Ames, Iowa after 8th grade, a larger town with a K-Mart,
which was new and exciting to me after having two dime stores with no
records in them in Brookings. I worked summers weeding
experimental fields for Iowa State U, starting around $2.50 an hour, so
I had some funds to start buying records, and the low prices of the
cut-outs (discounts) at K-Mart appealed to me, as well as their more
unusual fare... Besides the Lightnin Hopkins, I got Dave Van
Ronk, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Brownie and Sonny, all discounted because
the folk scene was collapsing under the electric rock and roll
onslaught. Meanwhile FM radio was coming into its own, playing
top 40 music that included Hendrix, the Doors, Janis Joplin, and the
Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead, and I was not immune to
their charms. After midnight you could hear Bleeker Street on a
clear channel AM radio, I think out of Little Rock, with lots of spacy
rock music. But I was also drawn to the Chicago blues--Muddy
Waters, Paul Butterfield, Otis Spann. For the high school
paper I wrote columns about the way rock musicians like Led Zeppelin
ripped off bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson without attribution.
It was Butterfield and Williamson that inspired me to take up the
harmonica.
While in high school, I made two critical visits to my brother in
college. The first was to Chicago when he was doing a summer
internship, and he took me to see Johnny and Edgar Winter and Paul
Butterfield, cementing my love of the blues. The second was to
the St. Olaf Folk Festival, with Mike Seeger as the headliner.
I'd heard of Pete, not Mike, but he managed to capture my full
attention with autoharp, fiddle, and guitar, and opened my eyes to the
world of American old-time music.
Meanwhile, in
Ames, there was a burgeoning acoustic music scene at the campus YMCA,
with local performers including a well qualified jug band, called, if I
remember rightly, The Jug Band.
After a Christian
youth band played at our church and encouraged us to start a
coffeehouse, Keith Wessel and I headed up a coffeehouse at our church
that became a hangout for disaffected youth and garage bands.
This also encouraged me to work on harmonica, though I never
played in a group in high school.
By college, I
had gained sufficient self confidence to play in jams and associated
with a very talented guitarist for a year or two. After freshman
year I used my field work money to get a beat up used Martin 00-18,
still my main guitar. I'd heard Mississippi John Hurt and
Elizabeth Cotten and Blind Blake before getting the guitar, so I knew
how I wanted to play. My guitarist friend, when I couldn't get
the hang of alternately picking melody, recommended picking mostly with
my index finger and using the middle finger just on the 6th string (and
I've always let my thumb do whatever it felt like).
By the next summer, I took a beater guitar along backpacking through
Europe, which in retrospect seems highly impractical... (One time
I left it standing on the platform and went off on a train, remembering
it and returning by the next train, where it still waited on the
platform).
My junior year of college I
roomed with another guitarist, which furthered my playing experience.
He also worked for the campus NPR station, and told me when the
current folk radio producer was leaving, enabling me to get the job.
I programmed 4 hours of music per week for 3 years, and had
several hundred mostly older folk records to draw from, in addition to
probably 50 I had acquired. Needing to fill these hours broadened
my musical outlook considerably--at that time the Folk Show encompassed
blues, ballads, folk, Irish, and world music, whereas now they would
tend to be separate programs. The Chieftains albums came as
promos to the station, but I was blown away by the melodies and
arrangements, and was fortunate to see them in concert in St. Paul.
At that time Garrison Keillor was just starting the Prairie Home
Companion, and we were the little NPR station serving the same metro
area as the fledgling MPR. I'd heard and liked a couple other
live radio concerts, so I added live concerts to the folk program,
without any of the shtick of PHC. I'd formed a trio with Gordy
Abel and Kari Veblen called Northfield and Southern, that did two radio
performances. There was also a couple bluegrass groups, and Uncle
Willy and the Brandysnifters, who were instrumental in documenting
early string band 78's in discographies and fun to have in concert as
well, doing totally obscure old time music. I took a tape
recorder to the Whole Coffeehouse to record several concerts and do
interviews, including a personal hero, John Fahey.
Along in there somewhere I got married, moved west, and living on a
potter's salary (there is none), I didn't collect any more music, or
play any more outside of the home, for around 10 years. I kept
playing guitar, and worked out arrangements of a lot of church hymns,
and worked a number of my original songs into a musical play.
When working on that, I took up MIDI keyboarding to write the
music down, and started composing tunes on the keyboard in the late
90's. I started attending jams again, especially after moving
back to Spirit Lake in the early 00's. I was early to put music
up on Youtube, which led to high ratings for my music, and the 2.1
million views I've amassed over the years. I played in the group
Musicians Anonymous until health issues forced an end to it, and
continued to associate with bassist Jonathan Hawkins playing small gigs
around the area until Jonathan's death in 2020. In 2021 we restarted an oldtime group called Old Plank Road...
INBMA 
