VA - Live on Mountain Stage: Outlaws and Outliers (2024)

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VA - Live on Mountain Stage: Outlaws and Outliers (2024)

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Mountain Stage is a two-hour, live music performance radio show staged with a theater audience, produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting, and distributed by NPR.

Mountain Stage debuted in December 1983 at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston, West Virginia. Since then, we’ve produced well over 1,000 shows at our home and as far away as Glasgow, Scotland and Fairbanks, Alaska. The venues have ranged from The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. to a portable stage in the woods of Pocahontas County, WV.

We are a team sport. Many of the folks who work with us have done so for more than 30 years and most have been here at least 20. Like a family, we’ve seen births and deaths, marriages and divorces, triumphs and tragedies. Stagehands, merch sellers, engineers, band members and producers have all contributed to the growth and evolution of the
show as have audience members, listeners, donors, and underwriters.

Francis Fisher, Andy Ridenour, and I started Mountain Stage with no experience in producing a show like this, almost no funding and very little equipment. Over the years, we’ve been told more than once that we couldn’t do this show in West Virginia. What we found was that this was probably the only place we could have done the show we wanted to do.

We wanted an artist driven show that included a wide range of musical styles played to a theater audience so guests received the feedback that leads to inspired performances. We’ve always given guests total freedom to play whatever they want. As Martina McBride put it, ”[Mountain Stage is] really a radio show like no other…it’s not about what your latest single is or what a hit record is, it’s about the music that you love.”

Francis was from Parkersburg, West Virginia. He learned radio electronics in the Navy, moved to New York City in the 1960’s, got a job with NBC radio where he worked with Wolfman Jack, Don Imus, and Jean Sheppard. He played by catching performances like The Velvet Underground (with Andy Warhol doing light shows). Francis was at the legendary 1965 Beatles concert in Shea Stadium (his only comment later was that the sound was bad) and got his first review in The Village Voice by Edward Albee for a Sam Shepherd play called “Icarus’s Mother” at Caffe Cino. Albee didn’t like the play but said
“the sound—some of it unquestionably the loudest in recent theatrical history—was by Francis Fisher. It was very nice, too.” In 1972 Francis returned to West Virginia to raise a family. He passed away in 2021.

Andy grew up in a multi-cultural neighborhood in Washington D.C., then attended Concord College in rural Athens, WV where he became a civil rights activist and helped establish their first college radio station. He was at the Cellar Door the night John Denver, Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert, premiered a song they had just finished titled “Country Roads”. Andy dropped out of college to begin a career in radio, ultimately with West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

I was born and raised in Dallas where I went to high school with Michael Martin Murphy, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and B.W, Stevenson. I lived in New York City and Los Angeles before coming to West Virginia in 1972 on a nine-month artist-in-the-schools grant. Prior to Mountain Stage I’d recorded several albums of my own songs, had the Top 10 hit, “Junk Food Junkie”, and was Grammy nominated for one of the three dozen children’s recordings I made for Walt Disney.

The three of us came from different backgrounds but ended up on the same wavelength. Francis was the engineer; Andy was the producer; I was the host and artistic director.

Mountain Stage has presented many different kinds of artists over the years: R.E.M. to Hazel Dickens, Bill Monroe to Baaba Maal, Mavis Staples to Phish, John Hartford to John Trudell to John Cale to John Pizzarelli. For this collection we’re sticking close to our core styles – roots country, folk, and Americana. The first time we were described as “Americana” was back in 1986 by Allen Ginsberg who was making his first of two appearances on the show.

We’ve always tried to choose artists with staying power. This album features the two most frequent guests on Mountain Stage, Tim O’Brien who first visited 1984 and Kathy Mattea who first came in 1985 and took over as host in September of 2021, Other long- time friends who began visiting the show in the 1980’s include James McMurtry, Lucinda Williams, and Bela Fleck. The Indigo Girls, Alison Krauss, John Prine, Wilco, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and Steve Earle premiered with us in the 1990’s. You’ll also hear some relative newcomers like Tyler Childers (2015), Birds of Chicago featuring Allison Russell (2016), Molly Tuttle (2018) and Sierra Farrell (2020).

“Outlaws and Outliers” refers to West Virginia and Mountain Stage as well as the artists in this collection. None of us has ever been in the mainstream. I hope you enjoy these performances as much as we do.