WPLN News Archive; WPLN-02-News-Archive-05

Find a great song, singing it as if it were your own creation. That's what recording artists try to do every day on Music Row, and few have succeeded as consistently as Kathy Matea. The Grammy-winning singer who recently released her tenth album from Mercury Records Love Travels On her new collection, Matea recorded spirituals, folk ballads, Celtic rock, attribute to Martin Luther King Jr., and a love song to a car. Giving voice to such a wide range of material is what Kathy Matea has done for years. I was really lucky when I started out. The first seven years of my career, except for my first album, I worked with Alan Reynolds,

and he really pointed my compass in a wonderful way and taught me about good songs. That was his mantra for me, he kept saying, pal, if you don't have a good song, nothing else is going to matter. So he taught me a lot about really holding out for great ones, and with him, I found a lot of songs that have really held up well over the years. And over time, you begin to realize the ones that you get tired of singing and the ones that you don't, and you start striving to find those on the front end more and more. So when I went to make this record, I decided to let the songs lead me, and that I didn't want to have a preconceived notion of how I wanted it to feel or sound. I just wanted it to be really honest, and I wanted it to be dense with good songs. When nothing news passed this way in a long time, maybe nothing's ever going to come. I think I better go and get my song.

Matea's 1994 release, Walking Away A Winner, produced two top ten singles and sold half a million copies. Despite that commercial success, Matea decided to take another direction in making her new record. Well, I had started to make a real commercial album like my last one, and found myself just feeling like that was wrong, and it was really a primal thing. I became depressed, and I didn't feel connected with the process at all, and I decided that I had to act on that, or I was just going to slap God in the face for the gifts that he's given me. Sometimes, I wonder what's the right thing, maybe you could let me know. No one else's vision ever let me see how your good intentions cast their spell on

me. I've had a long career, but the times that I have sort of left the well-beaten path and followed my heart have given me rewards that I could not foresee when I went to do it. I think of my record time passes by that way, and my Christmas album Good News was very much that way too, and what I found is that those records, because they're made from a place where all the fear is stripped away, the ways that I feel attached to them, other people feel, and a lot of times they get passed on, not through mainstream ways, but just through people turning each other on to them and buying them for each other. So I just had to have faith that if I made the right record, and a record that I could be proud of, and that I felt connected to, that I would be where I need to be.

Steve Matea is our guest on this week's Players and Poets Show on WPLN, tune in Saturday at 9 p.m. I'm Steve Key for Nashville Public Radio. Bye!! Beth, it's Cindy Cass.

Good, how are you? Good. I just wanted to check in with you after all our alumni events this past weekend. Nashville and Cindy Cass makes her living making sure people stay connected. As alumni programs director at Vanderbilt Law School, she's committed to making the university's graduates feel a part of the school. In her spare time, she is just as determined to keep politicians focused on improving libraries. Cass is one of hundreds of Davidson Countians who are on a mission of sorts to push to improve the city's library branches. Her group is called Friends of the Library. The mission is to support the public library to offer more services to more citizens. For instance, the Ballet performances of the Nashville Ballet at the Library Downtown are supported by the Friends of the Public Library. On the branch level, we hold book sales to raise money for the children's programs. I'm occasionally will hold benefit events. Although the group has pushed for better libraries for years, efforts began to intensify last month when Mayor Phil Bredeson unveiled his proposed $1.4 billion budget.

It includes a 73 cent property tax increase that Bredeson wants to use to improve schools and raise the pay of city workers. Eight cents would go toward building more libraries. The plan is to build four regional libraries with the main facility located in the parking lot of the downtown Metro Courthouse. Less believes. Eight cents doesn't place too heavy a financial burden on Nashvilleians. I feel as a natural citizen, you know, sure, I would love to have the lowest taxes possible, but I also feel that it's my civic responsibility to support the government of Nashville and the services that it provides to its citizens. And I am ready and willing to pay a little bit more tax each year if it means we can truly have a quality library system for our city. Why? I'm happy with the libraries the way it is. I like to go there. I have no problem getting my books from the Green Hills Library. The reason why we need to be bigger is because, you know, they're bursting at the scenes. There are a lot of things that we can have.

But not all Nashvilleians are as willing to pay extra. As evidenced in this informal debate between Dr. Maurice Quattab and librarian, Elise Adler and a coffee shop in the Hillsboro Village area near Green Hills. Quattab has been vocal on various community issues since the city closed a deal last year to bring the Houston Oilers to town. He believes any move to raise taxes should first be decided by the city's tax payers. The problem really is that here comes some salespeople again and the mayor is a salesperson and he is selling us this deal. We're going to make you feel better. Have you a big library? Why should we be in a hurry to have those, you know, big libraries? Oh, okay, if I call. Kenneth Tetford Jr. can think of any number of reasons. He says the library system links the world to persons like him with special needs. This text telephone device is only one of a few ways that makes it possible. Tetford grew up deaf with nine brothers and sisters.

You know, I didn't understand them and then they would be like, I asked him again, what do you say? They go, don't worry about it. So I felt so left out of the conversation, so down the street with the library. So I'll go down there all the time and pick up books and read them. Tetford is now executive director of the Tennessee Council for the Hearing and Paired. He credits the library with his success. He says his story is only one of thousands that should convince a skeptical public and Metro Council that the tax hike is needed. While the library system does offer tremendous resources for the college student or the professional doing company research, more could be done to accommodate the 1,000 visitors it gets today. Library director Donna Mancini nicely says, books need updating and more technology is needed to bring the library into the 21st century. We are just so far behind in not only how many books we have, you know, we only have half the number of books that we should have for a city our size. We are so far behind on the sizes of our facilities that we simply don't have the

room anymore to provide the services that people are really needing and demanding. She too says eight cents on every $100 of assessed property value for the library improvements is not a lot to ask for. That translates into $20 a year if you have a $100,000 house. We cannot buy one book for $20 that's less than the cost of one book now. The mayor feels strongly that school improvements and libraries should go hand in hand. The Metro Council is reviewing the mayor's proposal and takes a vote on a tax rate before July 1st. While there is speculation that the council is moving toward a lesser tax increase, friends of the library hope it won't come at the expense of libraries. In other words, of their bumper sticker, a city with a great library is a great city. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Terry Fields. There's an empty field at 630 mainstream drive and metro center and right now, around

there, it sounds a lot like this. But next week, all that will change. Monday afternoon at 3, Nashville Public Radio will break ground for its brand new facility, scheduled to be completed by March of 1998. On Tuesday, you should hear this. WPLN originally was licensed by the public library of Nashville and Davidson County and began broadcasting on December 17th, 1962, in a little room at the Richland Park branch. Two years later, the station moved into a corner of the Ben West Library in downtown Nashville, where it has been ever since. Its relationship with the library has always been a mutually beneficial one. However, the growth of both radio station and the library and the desire of both organizations to improve service to the community led library director Donna Nicely and station manager

Rob Gordon to recommend to the library board in 1995 that WPLN become independent, be a community-based, not-for-profit radio station. That proposal became a reality in October of 1996. The library graciously allowed WPLN to continue to occupy its long-time home until a new facility could be found. The decision to build from scratch wasn't part of the original plan, as station manager Rob Gordon explains. Actually, we thought we would be renovating, because there are so many things on the market at any given time, but as we looked, we found that existing buildings were either too expensive to renovate or unsuitable for some reason. We looked thoroughly. We went to, I think, 40 or 50 different locations. Over a period of months working with real estate agents came to the conclusion that we would be better off building if we could find a piece of land that we could afford. After looking at property all over Davidson County, an affordable site was located

in Metro Center. The design firm chosen was Russ Berger and Associates. They were our first choice because of the work they've done for other public radio stations. They did the work on NPR's new studios in Washington. They did the Car Talk studios in Boston. They do a lot of commercial sound, and they've done projects here in Nashville. People knew them. We did talk to some other people, but Berger was our choice. Assistant Station Manager Carl Peterson has worked closely with the Russ Berger design team. Two feels the new facility has great potential. The building is 11,500 square feet about a third of that space is what we call technical space, which is control rooms and studios. The additional space that we will have will greatly enhance our capabilities to produce programs, many different types of programs, some of which we simply cannot do now because of our limited space and technical facilities that we currently have. The technical space specifically will have an on-air control room and studio, a production

control room and studio, and then there will be a very large studio, which will permit us to do live music, record musical groups. We could have such things like town meeting broadcasts, variety of kind of programming can be done in this large room, which is about 750 square feet. Program Director Henry Finnell shares the feeling that great things are ahead for WPLN, although he doesn't want listeners to fear any potential changes. I don't think people should expect us to be a different radio station. We're going to be Nashville Public Radio, going to bring the same kind of news and music and information and entertainment that you come to expect. I think what you can't expect in addition to that are some new ventures from us. The new facility gives us a chance to do some things in this community that we have not been able to do before, be able to better take advantage of the creative talents in this community, the great resources here, writers and musicians, obviously, and this is going to be a place where we can bring all that together, I think, and present more of it and hopefully

do a better job, but I think this new facility will allow us to do a better job of what we do. We've gotten a lot of use out of this old vehicle up here, and I'm really proud of the work has come out of this station, but this new place is just going to allow us to do that much more. To serve listeners, I think, that much better. Naturally, WPLN's board and management looked long and hard at its finances before committing to this project, don't expect marble floors, chandeliers, fancy furniture, or a fountain in the lobby. Habcasner, who is treasurer of Nashville Public Radio's board, says they figured out how much should be spent and how best to fund it. We're borrowing the money through municipal bonds so we can get tax-free interest, and we're doing it that way because we have learned that our listeners will help us pay for what we need to do. What do you find most exciting about WPLN's future, about its independence, now the new building? What things make you go, yeah?

Rebecca, on fund drives all the time, you talk about the WPLN family. Over the years, it has never ceased to amaze me when you have groups like when we have somebody come to town who's one of the NPR people or when we have a meeting of various folks, any group of people that are associated with WPLN, it really does start to feel like a family, and for years, WPLN has been a child in a library, which worked out real well for a long, long time, but now WPLN is where it ought to be and where experts have been telling us for years at ought to be, and that's independent. I think that we had a moral obligation to stop having the city pay for a public radio station whose members have the ability to support it themselves, and I think with an organization that's focused solely on radio, we're going to get an even better radio station over time. So I think that's just terrific. Since WPLN's development staff is responsible for raising funds for the station, a new building adds some additional pressure.

The development director Julianne Stankowitz says they feel good about the numbers. Fortunately, we're in a terrific financial position because of the generous support of people throughout the Nashville community, the business community, and of course our members. We're very appreciative and pleased about that, so it looks like while there will be some special opportunities for people to be involved in helping to make the building possible for us, it's definitely going to happen and we're real excited about it. One thing about the new facility has everybody thrilled. And that's the ample parking area, as Morning Edition host Kev Riley explains. It's such an inconvenience for our members when they have to come downtown and deal with getting a parking meter or parking a lot near the library, and the library isn't open at all the hours that we are, so I think it'll be a lot more convenient for everybody, not only those of us who work there, but those of us who listen to the station and have to come down and volunteer and help us out during fundraising campaigns. His sentiments are echoed by Ken McKinney, who works closely with WPLN's volunteers. I am really excited that we're going to be able to provide a space for the volunteers

that will be very comfortable. The building will be accessible to them because there'll be lots of parking and it's pretty centrally located, and there will be facilities that will make them very comfortable. The fun drives will be a lot easier. I'm just really excited about how it's going to change the volunteer experience. And the thought of more room, more windows, and more green spaces, pleases music host will griffen enormously. The quality of the new work space is going to be a wonderful thing for us to experience, and I think we're all going to be a lot more productive over there. The actual groundbreaking is exciting for all of WPLN staff, but even better is what lies ahead for Nashville Public Radio. One station manager, Rob Gordon, the new building symbolizes our independence and our position in the community. And that's a feeling that we have now, as we've set our course for the next few years. It's sort of embodied in the fact that we'll have our own building and our own identity.

It's the fact that we will have a facility designed to do what we do. It will support our work. Nashville Public Radio's groundbreaking ceremony takes place Monday afternoon at three at 630 Mainstream Drive and Metro Center. The public is enthusiastically invited to attend, for we'd love everyone to share an hour excitement over our new home. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bain. Bredison wants more money for schools, libraries, infrastructure, and Metro employees' salaries. But to get it at the level he's requesting, a reluctant Metro Council must pass a 73-cent property tax increase, this in a year of re-appraisals. By state law, Metro must set a certified tax rate that will generate no more revenue from property taxes than last year.

What this means is, some Nashvilleians will actually see their tax bills go down. Others will stay about the same, but for many, in areas where property values have risen dramatically, their tax bills jump. Now comes the catch. To bring in more money, the state allows local governments to hike the local tax rate, and that's exactly what the Council is considering. Last night, in an almost two-hour public hearing, Council members listened to arguments for and against such a move. His taxpayers lined up out the door for a chance at the microphone. It soon became clear that the gallery was full of advocates, mainly advocates for school and library funding. People such as Vaughn Pritchett, who called his library card, the best ticket value in town. And this ticket doesn't cost $25, and it isn't just for eight Sundays out of the year. It's 365 days of the year, seven days a week, morning, noon and night, regardless of your race, color, creed, how much money you make. My son and I walked right in the library, got one of these bar-coded tickets for free.

Now we know there's a cost to it, obviously. But it's not a matter of there being the golden ghetto of the haves and the have-nots in our society. We fully fund the libraries like filling a well legitimately for all of us. Several spoken favor of a new main library, which many council members feel is unwarranted. Others talked about how an improved library system will go hand in hand with helping education. But once on the subject of schools, the tenor of the testimony changed. Last week, the Metro School Board approved a budget with a $20 million shortfall, much to the irritation of Mayor Phil Bredison and the council, under pressure, it reconsidered and passed a balanced budget. Several audience members, including Stan Scott, acknowledged that the damage may have been done, but asked the council to keep an open mind. And as bad as schools need the money, who in their right man would be comfortable in trusting this group with hundreds of millions of dollars more when they can't balance

their own budget? Well, that said, let's look at what the effect would be if you were a whole money from education. Do we get reduced people, teacher ratios? Do we get new and improved facilities? Do we get better test scores, a decrease in the dropout rate? Do we get anything positive? Of course not. What it will do is compound the problems, making them more difficult and expensive to resolve in the future. Now who among you wants to take credit for that? Margie Hunter has children attending Eacon Elementary. The timing of this thing stinks. And everything that could possibly go wrong seems to have gone wrong or conspired to make this thing the difficult sticky mess that it is, and I truly feel for you guys what you're going to be going through over the next seven to ten days, whatever it takes in order to get this thing done. But courage and confidence will get you through. The confidence that these items are appropriate and necessary for the future of our city, and the courage to support them and say yes. I truly believe that our children are worth a full 30 cents.

Don't you? Opposition to the tax increase was slim, but striking last night. This lady lives in the Sylvan Park area. The house two doors up sold last year for $168,000. My house this year which is smaller was evaluated at $248,000. What's wrong with this picture, folks? You're dividing this city into the young who can afford to pay, who have two workers in the family who can afford to pay the taxes. Against the older folks who have lived their whole entire lives here, pay their taxes, raise their children, and now you're turning against them. There's something wrong with this picture, folks, and it's up to y'all because your hour representatives, it's up to y'all to solve it. As a formality, the council passed the mayor's proposed budget on a second reading last night. The real vote on the budget comes next Tuesday. Today and tomorrow, the council's budget and finance committee will have its final budget hearings.

Library officials will make their case for more funding this afternoon. School officials will face some tough questioning before the committee tomorrow. Committee Chairman Ronnie Stein says the number for a tax increase keeps fluctuating. 73 cents is likely out. But my Monday, his group will be ready to present a more plausible number. More Nashville Public Radio, I need a bug. You can accuse Norman Maylor of many things, but laziness isn't one of them. He is the author of 30 books, and he has a National Book Award and two Pulitzer prizes to his credit. He co-founded the Village Voice in the 50s, and he has devoted a great deal of time and

energy to the actor studio for more than 40 years. In 1969, he ran unsuccessfully from Mayor of New York City on a secessionist platform, believing that the city should be the 51st state. He's acted on the stage and in films, and he's produced or directed several movies. His personal life has been busy, too. He's been married six times, and he has nine children. So what's left for the guy to do? Well, how about write the life of Christ from a first person point of view, which is exactly what Norman Maylor has done in his latest book, The Gospel According to the Sun, an interesting choice for a Jewish writer. It's absolutely within the realm of my belief that God could choose a human being to be his son and to appear on earth.

In a way, it's giving me a great understanding of Christians having written this book, because when I talk to some of my Christian friends, they say, you know, there was one who liked my book very much and said, you know, I live with Jesus every day of my life, and what got to me about your book is that you see the same Jesus that I see. So I was very taken with that. That's the finest praise I've received on the book. But it is true that certain characters do live with you afterward, and Jesus is one of them, yes. First Jesus is very definitely the human son of God. He is full of contradictions, and he frequently becomes enraged, violently so at times. However, Maylor doesn't think of his Jesus as a particularly angry man. Maybe I'm a very angry man. I don't know, but I saw him as being not that angry, angry at times, because he's human. But no, I thought he was full of forgiveness, he was full of understanding. For instance, when he's going to see the daughter, Jairus, and the woman who hasn't stopped bleeding for many, many years, touches his garment, and he says who touched me, because

he feels his power is leaving him for a moment, and she confesses that she's the one, and he blesses her. He understands her need, he's compassionate, even though at that moment, the last thing he wanted was to be touched by someone other than the person he was going to see, because he wanted to work a miracle upon Jairus' daughter. So given that, I wanted to make him human, and a part of being human is to be angry. One person's reaction to the gospel, according to the son, interested Norman Maylor very much, that of his father-in-law, a very devout member of the free will Baptist Church. He said, you know, I kind of like that, he said, I found it kind of interesting. After all, the gospel's don't cover every last thing that Jesus did, and this was interesting for me. I could really follow some of the things, and naturally I didn't agree with a lot of it, but it was all right. I kind of like the book, he said, which I was very pleased with, because he is one devout fundamentalist. Originally, Norman Maylor wanted to publish the gospel, according to the son, anonymously, with the author's name to be released three months after the publication date.

Unfortunately, his timing was bad for this particular stunt. Publishing House is random house, and of course they put out primary colors. Just about the time I was saying to them, listen, I wish you guys would really consider this. They ran to all that trouble with the first book, and I think their feeling at that time was once a philosopher, twice a pervert. They didn't dare put out another anonymous book. But I thought it would be fun, literally fun, to have the book come out and have random house announced that one of the more important American authors, not saying with their male or female, has written this book, and the name will be announced in three months. And I thought that would be a wonderful game. David's kid booksellers presents an evening with Norman Maylor, tomorrow night at seven in T-Packs' Polk Theatre. Mr. Maylor will discuss the gospel according to the son, and then we'll sign copies of the book. This event is free, but to reserve a space, advanced tickets are available at David's kid booksellers, or at T-Packs the night of the event. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bain. The idea was to expand coverage for thousands of the state's working poor who weren't

eligible for Medicaid, but over the last three years, budget concerns have forced Governor Don Sunquist administration to cut enrollment, charge higher premiums, and take a more aggressive approach to collections. Advocates, like Tony Gar, understand what the state is going through. In fact, Gar says he's grateful the program managed to escape budget cuts in the upcoming fiscal year. That despite the fact enrollment has remained closed since 1995 to adults who are working and healthy. Right now, the state is budgeted to cover 1.2 million Tennesseans during the next fiscal year, the start July 1. If the state had an extra $40 million to match with federal money, then the state probably could extend health insurance to adults, and there wouldn't be any fear about doing that. In a time of belt tightening, the Sunquist administration is still managed to reopen enrollment to children under 18 who do not have access to health coverage through a parent or guardian.

I think the major reason that the state is not opening enrollment for adults. The capitation rate that the state has to pay to the men's curingization for adults is a lot higher than it is for kids. At least previous to this year, the capitation rate for a child under the age of 14 was only about $39 per month per child, whereas an adult is over $100 per month per adult. But despite the low cost, only about 11,000 of the 68,000 eligible children in the state are signed up for 10 care coverage. I think it's a mystery to the state, as well as a mystery to us why more kids haven't signed up. I'm assuming that one of those reasons that many families haven't signed up is that they have access to their employer health insurance, but they simply can't afford it. Orgar says there is a lack of understanding.

Keith Johnson, who directs 10 care operations for the state, has a different perspective. He says the state has done everything possible to get the word out about 10 care, including community outreach meetings, contacting daycare centers, school programs, and administrators. Johnson says not one of the community outreach meetings was crowded. I do not know what more we can do as far as outreach. We've hit everywhere we know to hit. We've done everything we know to do. I have to believe that with many of these people, it's not a priority right now. And I'm saddened by that, but you cannot force people to enroll their children in something that they do not feel they need. And of course, I'm sure a part of it is that there could be cost sharing responsibilities. If the numbers of those enrolling doesn't improve, the governor's order that 10 care be open January 1st, not only to children of parents who are uninsurable, but to those who can't afford coverage as well. Johnson says they hope to sign 27,000 children.

And we're going to try to give as many people as possible access, but at the same time, we can't open the door so far that we become irresponsible and can't take care of the ones that legitimately deserve and need it. I have a bachelor's degree, I'm married, however, my husband and I are separated, so therefore I am out here by myself with a child. So I have to deal with worrying about if she's going to fall and break her neck and how I'm going to pay for it. In the meantime, single mothers like 23 year old Mary are living on edge. The mother of a two year old Mary works at a local health care agency. She makes $12 an hour, but the position is only temporary. And health care coverage is too expensive. She's tried for the last three years to get health coverage for her daughter. I went to human services, I asked them for help. I applied for all types of aid, but I couldn't get any of it, none whatsoever. The simple fact is because they told me that I was over, quote, the limit is what they

say. I made too much, I was over the edge, I made too much of what their criteria was. Although there are still a few problems that plague the 10 care program, advocates for the poor say it still outranks other states. As of June 7th, there were more than 341,000 Tennesseans who might not otherwise have had health insurance had it not been for 10 care. Officials contend that still makes the state's Medicaid alternative light years ahead of other states that are still struggling to contain health care costs for the poor and indigent. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Terry Fields. Nearly a decade ago, writer John Edgerton penned a delightful essay on iced tea, saying among other things, considering how much a fresh glass of iced tea adds to a good plate lunch or supper and how welcome it is almost any time. The wonder is not that Southerners drink so much of it, but rather that the rest of the

world drink so little. Apparently Americans outside the South have now realized the wisdom of John's words, because today, nearly 85% of the tea consumed in the United States is served over ice. This summer alone will drink more than 10 billion glasses of iced tea. That's nearly 110 million glasses each day. Most of us grew up on Lipton or Tetley teas, and while a glass of these black teas, as they're called, has only about half the caffeine of a cup of coffee. That's still more stimulation than some people want to drink. But Dorie Norris can solve that problem easily. The proprietor of sage cottage in Franklin, Tennessee, Dorie teaches classes on growing herbs and their myriad uses, including herb teas. As we strolled along her beverage walk, she pointed out the plants which grew up nicely. As he brews so shall he drink is the new sign in her beverage walk.

We've got a coffee plant and several kinds of mints, b-bomb, lemon grass, lemon verbeno, which is just beginning to take on over there. There's New Jersey tea, see an anthus right over there, that the colonist drank instead of tea from England, and that's Navajo tea, a fedra, the little one that looks like it hasn't gotten its leaves yet, and down there is a big rosa regosa alba, which has wonderful rose hips. Great, huge ones, which are full of vitamin C, which make good winter teas. There's chamomile coming down the pathway. The time up there will be great for teas, and we've got some times down here that are a little bit different. It smells so good, you get the wind through and you get little different aromas. Well you get different smells from an herb garden depending on the time of day. If you come out in the early morning when it's damp, you can smell the fennel, and that's the only time you can really smell it.

And that's the fennel there, the fennel there. That's the tall, wonderful bronzy thing is the fennel, isn't that a beauty? It is, it's gorgeous. Fennel is a symbol of flattery, because a flattery doesn't last, and if you make a wreath out of fennel, it immediately wilts. So beware, anybody who offers you fennel in praise, it won't last. Despite all the recent rain, Dory's mini gardens are lovely, and the plants seem to stretch to the sunshine pouring down on them. In fact, despite the breeze, which was blowing, it was hot for the first time in a long time. So I accepted with pleasure Dory's offer of a glass of iced herb tea. We sat on the couch in sage cottage, sipping a wonderfully refreshing greenish yellow tea with tiny flowers floating in it. Dory told me its contents. This is the cantamum, polyosum, and it's bbom, and the flower on the top is a little carnation.

It smells good. This particular mint has a really strong, under flavor. It's not a sweet mint at all, but it's a strong, pungent one. While I uninhibitedly slurped my iced tea, Dory told me some other plants and herbs that she turns into delicious drinks. The Tennessee passion flower may pop, makes wonderful tea. Two natives both mince, they're called the cantamums, but they're in the mint family. That's what's in your tea right now. When we have rose hips and we have fennel, they used to take the seeds to church and nibble on them because they taste like anus and they're sweet, and you feel like you're really eating something. But there aren't any calories in them, so when you drink fennel tea you still feel full and it makes a lovely tea. There are countless combinations of plants and herbs which make wonderful teas, many of which you can grow in your own backyard. Dory likes to use the top leaves on the plant, she says just crush a handful, put them in a cup, pour boiling water over the leaves, cover, and let it steep for several minutes.

Strain into a glass, add lots of ice, and then sit back and savor this gift from the gods. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bain. Do you like to come over for tea with the Mrs. and me? It's a real nice way to spend a day in Dayton, Ohio, or the sun is on the afternoon in 1903. Paul McClean is a fourth generation Scott. After he married his wife Sophia last September, McClean got to realize a lifelong ambition to travel throughout Scotland and learn about his roots. For four months McClean documented his life changing experiences with paint. The trip to Scotland was a voyage of discovery for me.

It was really about reinvesting myself and who I am, where I came from, the history of my people, and qualifying, you know, what I am today. McClean's visit to his homeland has helped him understand who he is, both as a person and as an artist. It's probably the place where I felt most of my life that I really belonged at every level. Walking in the mountains, they call it hill walking, for me, was about as powerful an emotional experience, almost a spiritual experience. I have always used a certain type of figurative style that really I thought was my own and it's very stylized and seeing the figurative styles of Scottish artisans and artists. I've found a place where I fit in. McClean is showing his new figurative and landscape paintings at the Canary's Peanut Gallery. The show is a visual documentary of his connection with his ancestry.

He calls the show, where my feet stick to the ground. I was walking in the mountains on Ben Moore, which is the tallest mountain on the Isle of Mall, and that's where that phrase occurred to me, where my feet stick to the ground. It's kind of a feeling of integration. McClean has only recently tackled landscapes. He said that before Scotland, he wasn't inspired enough to paint them. There's a story for every mountain top. There's a story for every stream, there's a story for every beach, and what I tried to translate into the paintings here, which I think is probably as effective as I've ever done it, is that layering of meaning that occurs. The land in its people inspired him so much he painted enough work to have two shows while he was there, one in Edinburgh and the other on the Isle of Skye in Fort Trey. He's dedicated the Nashville exhibit to the memory of Scottish poet, Sorley McClean, who died just two days before the show opened in Fort Trey. Discovering Sorley and his work was transformative and powerful, and that was coupled with a sort

of sense of loss, because just as soon as we got to know who he was, he was gone. This is a great man. This is one of the men who stayed, and here in the United States just about everybody's a refugee, and this is someone who stayed in the land where his feet stuck to the ground. McClean talks about his work, like he's pointing out pages of a precious scrapbook. When he looks at the painting of his wife Sophia, he smiles all to himself. He credits her for giving him the impetus to find his roots. When she found a for-leave clover on the Isle of Maul, they considered it a symbol of the extraordinary nature of the trip. We didn't really know how big a deal it was until we went on on our travels and told people, and every person that we told about that had tried since they were children to find a for-leave clover and never had, so it was a really special thing. There's a long tradition in Western art of seeking one's homeland, and painting the

discoveries and disappointments found along the way. I think everybody today has a sense of loss for the place that they come from. The deep feelings that people have for their homelands inspire returnings, and I think those are maybe the most powerful of voices today. Artists like Turner, John Singer Sargent, and On Grey offered their experiences to the world through their paintings. Today's audience, however, has a luxury of getting on a plane and seeing the land for themselves. Rather than seeming exotic, McClean's paintings offer sense of hopefulness for his homeland on the verge of its independence from Great Britain. Returning to the place where one belongs is as powerful and strong and inspiring an experience as any that I know of. I hope people are encouraged to do the same thing for themselves, and also to be open enough to experience with me the amazing wealth of feeling and knowledge that I got just going

back to where I came from. I'm Adrienne Outlaw for Nashville Public Radio. On a hot June day with temperatures in the 90s, it's not unusual to see more than 100 people, most of them children, proud into the pool here at Luby Community Center in North Nashville. The cool water serves as a relief of the children at play here. It also comes as a relief to working mothers like Lindy Subram. She just happened to have the time today to watch her twins play in the pool. It's a rare opportunity, one she knows that other mothers don't often get. It can be really difficult for a mother who's got to hit the door from nine to five and got to figure out, don't want to leave their children at home because they don't have

making sure that they're not sitting in front of a television and who's going to be knocking on my son or daughter's door. But wanting to do the best they can, but just not the funds available. The Luby Center is one of about 20 in Nashville, most of them in the inner city. They serve as a valuable resource to teenagers like 17-year-old Hank Jones. The best thing to do is to pool, you stay away from the valley, and you come to the pool, not go to the gym, shoot off. Those are the kind of comments that Conti Harris likes to hear. He grew up around a community center, he's the recreation director, and he created the center's swimming team. Harry says there aren't many who are willing or have the time to work with children like they used to. Most shy away from the job because of too many required courses and too many responsibilities. This is not a job that anybody can walk up to because you have to have a lot of patience, you know. And you really have to just really be real good and want to work around kids.

There are also other factors that come into play as well. The major one is the fear of crime in areas where the majority of community centers are located. Out of the 2017 are located within inner city areas. Peggy Toulis oversees the community centers for Metro. When we interview people that come from just completed their educations and we talk about the locations where they might possibly be placed, then a lot of those people don't want the jobs. It's a problem that Toulis looks at realistically with center hours being from 130 to 10 at night. She says there are risks involved. A worker has never been harmed, but she says there have been close calls. That's why there are safety precautions like weapons and body searches. And we feel that if guns are brought to school, then surely they would be brought into the community centers as well. We want to provide a safe environment for the children there, so scanning is periodically done. We've got signs posted on the community centers telling them that patrons are subject to search. Toulis worries more about the impact budget cuts have had on centers in the last few years.

There were 26 when she started in her position 26 years ago. Now the number of centers has to wendled to 20. But attendance is growing and she attributes it to more parents in the workplace. It's very important that people realize that we're there and that we do try to make a difference in these children's lives and the children that we work with might be the children that might wind up to be your next community leaders or they might also wind up to be those children that might rob you. So our concern is to try to pull the best out of all of them. I just pray and hope that you know doing my time in early, we can raise some of these kids because I'm hoping that God let me stay on the server longer. I'm going to get older to see some of these kids get older and then they can you know, they can feel to write in through the process of that I came up to. It's a dream that already may be closer to reality for recreation director Conti Harris just outside the center's front doors for children ages 6 to 12 play. 11 year old Cory Smith talks about how the center workers discipline him when he gets into trouble. They tell our mom and they make sure we want to get, they make sure that we get our punishment

because if we don't get our punishment, we're going to still do it again. So they keep making it work. Cory's friend, 11 year old Cortez, Curry says, he already knows what he wants to be when he grows up. I love to be making money. I know him. I love to make money. So if I was older, I would have got a job job up here and so. Faced with the possibility of more funding cutbacks in the future, the recreation division is looking to private business and grant making organizations in order to help provide more services with what they call our most valuable resource, our children. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Terry Field. And I just have to pinch myself for once. Well, I've been so lucky and I'm so grateful to all those people I tell them when I go on the road and police shows and I have 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 people, I appreciate them supporting my habit of planning a tour and I really do because without them, I'd be nothing.

Chad Atkins, producer, record label manager, Picker extraordinaire. For 50 years, he's been doing what he loves, making music. This week, he wants to share that love with as many people as possible with musician days. In the next four days, musicians from around the world will gather here in Nashville to celebrate their craft. There'll be scheduled concerts and in promp to jam sessions at stages city wide and all of the performances are free. Saturday morning, miniature master workshops for kids begin at 11 at the arena and Grammy Master Sessions begin at 1230. Nashville bassist Dave Pomeroy will lead one of the master workshops. He plans to bring along about eight or nine members of his bass orchestra to shed a little light on just what his instrument can do. Simple things that will hopefully reach out to the kids and say, hey, you know, now here's an instrument that everybody thinks does this one thing.

Now check this out, there's a lot of different ways to play the bass, a lot of different ways to approach it and when we put it all together, it sounds like this and hopefully the arena won't crumble. I think Phil Brettis would be really mad at me if I broke the arena. Tell me what the bass can do. Well, it's a great percussive instrument, you know, on my record, bass is loaded. I didn't use any other instruments and I overdubbed everything myself and I did things, you know, I was doing a little horn parts, you know, I, just little things were playing against the rhythms. It's a great percussion instrument. You can get into drum things, percussion things. On one song I used the side of the bass, doing this kind of sound is like a snare drum and you get the mic turned up really loud. It sounds pretty close to the snare drum. Different things, I used different effects devices to alter the sound of the bass.

So it's a combination of techniques. If you use a pick, you can get a real muted sound as opposed to those kind of things. You can alter the way you pick it. You can, you know, do things, people like Victor Wooden are actually doing this kind of hammer on stuff where they play two hands on the neck. It's really almost limitless and of course, you know, the funky thing where you play with your thumb, you know. Pomeroy and visions sing along with the kids on Saturday and maybe, just maybe. If a few basses are available, a little jam session with the audience. Enjoying and appreciating music, he says, that's what it's all about. Music is fun and music is for everyone and you don't need to have thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment to make music. You know, you can make music with, you know, coffee cans and spoons and, you know, anything.

And, you know, to realize that music, hey, it's just fun. You know, it doesn't need to be, you know, Shostakovich or, or, or, you know, Muddy Waters or whatever. It can just be you making a noise that feels good to you. One day the bass players decided to uprise. We're trying to be inside men to all those other guys. So we kidnapped the horn sections, spiked the drummer's drinks and tied up the guitar players with them big old flat wound strings. Of course, we didn't tie up Chet because we really like him, but all those other guys better watch out. Basis Day, Pomeroy. For more information about venues, performers and workshops for Chet Atkins musician days, you can call their hotline at 256-2073, that's 256-2073 or visit the website at WWW dot musiciandays dot com.

For Nashville Public Radio, I'm a need a book. One day the bass players decided to uprise. We're trying to be in step-down by all this techno drive. So we erased the memories of all those drum machines and locked away the keyboards and the sampling things. I said the sampling things are putting bass players out of a job that ain't right. That ain't right. Simple this. And so the world was finally set free. The animals all hung out, they interacted fredlessly. And the beginning of our break was such a deep dronality. The day the bass players took over the world.

The day the bass players took over the world. The day the bass players took over the world. Look out now, we're coming to get you. The day the bass players took over the world. It's inspiring to watch Vance Cummings weld steel. As he sculpts huge chunks of metal, sparks fly from the area where he's welding and form a circle with brilliant dashes of orange light. He's even inspired some local musicians like Keyboardist Ed Donzerow to create songs. We came over and watched me work one day and then went home and composed this piece around grinder noises and stuff and called it the maker. Cummings uses mostly black iron steel but also works with stainless steel, copper, brass

and the occasional piece of wood. His sculptures look heavy but light at the same time. The delicate lines balance with thick geometric shapes. The sculptures can also be surprising, they move. At his current show at the Canary's Peanut Gallery, people usually examine his sculptures without touching them. But when a breeze or a person moves them, the sculptures take on a life of their own. I've noticed that two or three shows, you know, where one will be in there and they'll just sit there. Everybody comes by and it mars the piece and they think, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and they go on and then later somebody else will move it and then all these people come back to look a second time. There's another challenge involved in making the piece to balance it. And even though it might weigh 200 pounds to make it to where the slightest little breeze will make it move, that makes hard fun and hard's got to be fun. Fun, but time consuming. Cummings says it takes him anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of years to make a sculpture.

And the frenzy of making art and feeling the creative urge, you know, to go out there and make a piece and you don't know if it's going to be big, you don't know if it's going to be small, but you just know you're making this, it's working, this is happening, and two hours later you're finished, you know, and those to me are the most wonderful pieces. Some of them are very personal. I used to always think that if you had personal conflict going on in your life and that's when you made your strongest pieces of art. When he moved to Nashville about four years ago, he started working outside, which sparked his imagination and color experimentation. He lets the steel rust then coats it with a thick layer of polyurethane enamel. There's pretty colors involved. If you can catch them and make them stop right where they are, then, you know, you can keep that look about it and I think there's a beauty to it. Though Cummings says he's felt the creative urge his whole life, he only really started making art after he took a welding job during college. He's continued working as a welder for the past 17 years so that he can have access to materials.

Most of the people that I worked with weren't really familiar with modern art so much they just thought it'd look like a big pile of junk. So I always had people walk in mind asking me, you know, what's that, you know, well, it's whatever you want it to be, you know, and why don't you make a guy on a horse and stuff like that, you know, the materials there were wonderful and the facility was wonderful because I could use their space and had all these cranes I could use and stuff. Many artists use found objects in their work, worn or discarded items can suggest enticing references and offer more perspectives. The neater pieces I find, I find in a factory and they're dumpsters where they cut something out and they throw the other piece away and the piece that they throw away is what I'll get used later on. I found this piece at a factory just like it is. So you know, you see stuff like that laying around, it's just saying, here I am. He's describing a rusted piece of discarded metal. It has short but sweeping, half crescent shapes that almost look like leaves.

Sometimes comings can create an entire sculpture around a form like that. He intuitively adds and subtracts elements until he gets it where he wants it. The first thing I'm going to do is cut this off right here. And now it's different than it was but yet reflects some of the old memory. My goal is to be eventually work to be self-sufficient, whether that be making art all the time or making art part of the time and fixing some guy's tractor, and I just don't worry about trying to cut it. I'll just do what I feel like doing, hopefully my back holds out and I get to do it for a long time. I'm Adrienne Outlaw for Nashville Public Radio. Nearly a decade ago, writer John Edgerton penned a delightful essay on iced tea, saying

among other things, considering how much a fresh glass of iced tea adds to a good plate lunch or supper and how welcome it is almost any time, the wonder is not that southerners drink so much of it, but rather that the rest of the world drink so little. Apparently Americans outside the South have now realized the wisdom of John's words because today, nearly 85% of the tea consumed in the United States is served over ice. This summer alone will drink more than 10 billion glasses of iced tea. That's nearly 110 million glasses each day. Most of us grew up on Lipton or Tetley teas, and while a glass of these black teas as they're called has only about half the caffeine of a cup of coffee, that's still more stimulation than some people want to drink. But Dorie Norris can solve that problem easily.

The proprietor of sage cottage in Franklin, Tennessee, Dorie teaches classes on growing herbs and their myriad uses, including herb teas. As we strolled along her beverage walk, she pointed out the plants which brew up nicely. Since he brews so shall he drink is the new sign in her beverage walk. We've got a coffee plant and several kinds of mints, b-bomb, lemon grass, lemon verbina, which is just beginning to take on over there. There's New Jersey tea, see an anthus right over there, that the colonist drank instead of tea from England, and that's Navajo tea, a fedra, the little one that looks like it hasn't gotten its leaves yet. And down there is a big rosa regosa alba, which has wonderful rose hips, great, huge ones, which are full of vitamin C, which make good winter teas. There's chamomile coming down the pathway, the time up there will be great for teas, and we've got some times down here that are a little bit different.

Yeah, it smells so good. You get the wind through and you get little different aromas. Well, you get different smells from an herb garden depending on the time of day. If you come out in the early morning when it's damp, you can smell the fennel, and that's the only time you can really smell it. And that's the fennel there, the fennel there. That's the tall, wonderful bronzy thing is the fennel, isn't that a beauty? It is, it's gorgeous. Fennel is a symbol of flattery because the flattery doesn't last, and if you make a wreath out of fennel, it immediately wilts, so beware, anybody who offers you fennel in praise. It won't last. Despite all the recent rain, Dory's many gardens are lovely, and the plants seem to stretch to the sunshine pouring down on them. In fact, despite the breeze which was blowing, it was hot for the first time in a long time, so I accepted with pleasure Dory's offer of a glass of iced herb tea. We sat on the couch in sage cottage, sipping a wonderfully refreshing greenish yellow tea

with tiny flowers floating in it. Dory told me its contents. This is the cantamum, polyosum, and it's v-bom, and the flower on the top is a little carnation, and it smells good. This particular mint has a really strong, under flavor. It's not a sweet mint at all, but it's a strong, pungent one. While I uninhibitedly slurped my iced tea, Dory told me some other plants and herbs that she turns into delicious drinks. The Tennessee passion flower may pop, makes wonderful tea. Two natives both mince, they're called the cantamums, but they're in the mint family. That's what's in your tea right now, and we have rose hips, and we have fennel. They used to take the seeds to church, and nibble on them, because they taste like anus and they're sweet, and you feel like you're really eating something. But there aren't any calories in them, so when you drink fennel tea, you still feel full,

and it makes a lovely tea. There are countless combinations of plants and herbs, which make wonderful teas, many of which you can grow in your own backyard. Dory likes to use the top leaves on the plant. She says, just crush a handful, put them in a cup, pour boiling water over the leaves, cover, and let it steep for several minutes. Strain into a glass, add lots of ice, and then sit back, and savor this gift from the gods. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bane. In the western portion of Davidson County, it's the exclusive Hound's Run community.

A neighborhood right out of a magazine, each custom built home, offers the feel of serenity. Some sit on parcels that are flat, while others seem wrapped in greenery that winds all the way up picturesque heels. These are anywhere from probably on the low end, probably 625 to 900. Tennessee's real estate market is one of the best in the country. The number of residential homes listed as sold was up 21% in June compared to the same period last year. Broker Rick wrote of the Nashville Realty Association says, property has appreciated an average 5 to 8% since 1993. Consequently, wrote says, affordable property near the much coveted downtown area is nearly nonexistent now, that's prompted developers to get more creative in their search for acreage. I would think, say 10 years ago, that anybody would build on lots such as these here in Hound's Run and today, you've got fantastic properties on them.

These all these, you know, opulent improvements, big homes, eight, you know, 6, 800, 900,000. And the reason is, is just people want this locale, they want the view. Where they are building such homes is what bothers state emergency management agency director Cecil Waley. Now they're building properties on places that we used to consider floodplain areas or substandard areas or areas which might be over cave situation, this carst topography. Also they're building on the sides of hills, which are very prone to these mudslides and landslides, which we never did thank much of around here before, because we didn't build many houses like that on the sides of the hills. Now we are in very expensive homes. According to wrote, the homeowners in the Hound's Run area have built a necessary retainer walls and other topographical landscaping to prevent future mudslides and other drainage problems associated with heavy rains.

But for those who can't afford it or those who simply aren't knowledgeable, it's a problem that keeps these team workers on alert when heavy rains hit. Agency director Cecil Waley worries because Tennessee is riddled with caves. In fact the state is often referred to as the caving paradise of America. Waley says in some cases caves lay only six to seven feet below the soil and with enough rain it can be devastating. Waley points to flooding last spring which has left an entire community in Oak Grove, Kentucky under water. The pressure from the water standing up above this carst topography underneath the ground has caused the earth to settle down into some of those caverns underneath. And with it is just basically the whole ground above sunk about six feet. And that's what they have now is basically a newly created lake there. Waley looks to both the city council and the state legislature to come up with solutions to prevent any similar tragedies here. In the meantime he urges homeowners to beware. People don't think about the damage to their homes, potential damage to their homes when

they first buy the home. They usually buy their home thinking about well this is close to a school or the view is wonderful or this is just the right size kitchen or bathroom for us. But you know they never think about the fact that they may be in a flood plain. They may be in a place that they could have earth mudslides which has become a big thing now on damaging homes. Concerned about the number of consumer complaints about property and building a couple of years ago the state legislature passed stricter laws requiring real estate agents to disclose any adverse conditions on property. Even so official say being inquisitive and knowledgeable are the best defense for protection. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Terry Fields. Okay, they look dead on it the camera.

Great. Rebecca Walk is used to documenting life through her lens where they're showing street photography, portraiture or planned compositions. A few months ago she started to tell a different kind of story by photographing a group of Nashville artists in their studios. In her new series, Walk isn't just factually recording history, she's using the artist as characters for her own vision. Walk says she got the idea for her series from a photograph of a famous artist. It shows him in front of his easel in his studio with a cat by his side. Each artist deals differently with the challenges of being photographed. A lot of people are very happy to show me their work and they're like, oh look at this and I'm doing this and they're really excited about it and they're eager to share and eager to show, not necessarily even to know what I think, just eager to show.

And then some people are just really quiet about it, not looking for anything. I think they just want me to take the pictures and leave. My mind is just doing 60 different things in like three seconds. So what, stay cool, stay cool, it'll just be a minute, it'll just be a minute, let me move this, they'll just be still, I'll be right there. She's had to deal with difficult compositional situations while getting artists to relax. The artists have had to give up part of their normal control and their environment and trust that Walk will present the work the way they intended it to be perceived. Walk gets her shots after entering the artist's space and deciding what she wants to focus on. When you walk into an artist studio, you have no idea, I mean I don't location scout, I have no idea what these people's places look like until I walk into it. Walk often has to work within a limited timeframe to get just the right shot for her story. The artist is, you know, somebody who gets up at noon and drinks some coffee and then

stays up till, you know, three, you know, a guest to a degree that's true, but it's really not. I mean, all of these people that I have shot are in complete tail spans all the time, getting ready for shows, making you are, you know, doing things to their spaces. They're always creating and just always, always busy. So to squeeze me into their schedule is really something. Okay, could you just sit down and what I want you to do is put your chin in your hand and lean toward me just almost looming at the camera. Walk also has to get the artist to shoot and understand that as an artist, she has to be trusted to create a vision. In some respects, the artist is only her subject matter. Sometimes it's a control issue. I think sometimes people don't understand what it is to be behind the lens. They can't see it through my eyes. All they know is that God, I don't know what they're thinking. I guess they just want to be in control of it, you know, and they're not necessarily fearful

for their art, but they want to make sure that it's in good hands and that it's taken care of as it's being shifted around or moved or that sort of thing. And I'm always very cautious if I walk into a situation and I don't have to move the art. I don't. Okay, just turn your head a little to the right, changing on just a hair, perfect. Sometimes it has to be arranged. But I just try to be very diplomatic and say, okay, this is not looking good or this is not working, you know, can we do this, can we move this over here? Some situations, you know, I let the artist do the kind of set directing or art directing or that sort of thing and that way they get to kind of have a hand in it, which might make them feel a little more comfortable about, you know, having their art best with. By photographing artists, as she sees them, walk doesn't just document. Her photographs talk about the struggle and the frustration, the humor and the joy and the pride of creating.

She plans to present this series this fall in Nashville. This is history or, you know, this could be history, you know, something could be happening here, you know, get it on film. I started it on a whim and it's turning into something much bigger than I ever anticipated. I made you an outlaw for Nashville Public Radio. Every time I see your face it reminds me of the places you used to go. But all I've got is a photograph and I realize you're not coming back anymore. Although the United States tobacco company is best known for its smokeless tobacco products, the jewel in the company crown is undeniably its museum of tobacco art and history.

Located on the second floor of their white marble office building across from the farmers market, this is the only museum in the United States devoted to preserving the art and artifacts associated with tobacco. When its holdings are some of the most beautiful and fascinating items you can imagine. 15 years ago today, the museum first opened its doors and to help commemorate the occasion, Museum Curator David Wright has collaborated with Benjamin Rappaport and Tom Boudreau to produce an impressive book with stunning photographs of the museum's collection. Dazzled by the beauty of some of these pipes, tobacco jars, snuff boxes and tins, I visited the museum recently to see these treasures for myself. David Wright began the tour at a case containing some small, bent, two-black artifacts. The pipes over here on the right side of this case come to us from the Iroquois Indians that live in what is today is New York and Pennsylvania area and those pipes date about

500 to 800 years in age, made of clay. And the large pipe here on the bottom is from Argentina, South America, it's also made of clay, it's about 800 years in age as well, it's heavy, the pipe weighs 5 pounds. They actually would sit to smoke a pipe like this, have a long stem and they would smoke it in a council type sitting. And they used tobacco very sparingly, they used them for special rituals and ceremonies. They would use the tobacco to cleanse the soil before they would converse with the spirits or before together for a very important meeting with a special ritual. The museum contains pipes made from porcelain, from wood and horn and the calabash gourd. There are puzzle pipes and snake pipes and commemorative pipes and mere shom pipes so exquisitely and intricately carved, they defied description. There are pipes from Africa and Asia and Europe. And in one large case are glass pipes, beautifully shaped into twists and swirls, glowing in shades of deep ruby and cobalt blue, with purest white shot through them.

They were never smoked, the glass blower has made these to show off their skills and talents as a glass blower. And as you can see there's a lot of loops and curls and twist and turns to this hand-blown glass and they're beautiful and they would hang these in their shop windows. The pipes are very old too, they day from about 1790, around 1820 and they come from two parts of the world, England and Venice Italy. Located around the museum are those familiar symbols of the tobacco-ness shops, the cigar store Indians. Some are carved of wood, others are cast zinc. My favorite was a mother whose baby is strapped to her back. She's cast in zinc, sometime around 1874 in New York City and so by the William DeMood Company located on 5-1 Broadway and then most likely shipped by train, boat or wagon to her final destination. Now what is interesting about this figure is that a person would go through a meltwater catalog to purchase her.

They would have an option, they could buy her with or without the papoos. The baby was extra. She was $85 by herself and if the store owner could afford the baby and most could not, she was an additional $10. In her hand, the mother holes a bundle of cigars bound with a silk ribbon. As housewives who hated to throw anything away would make things with these silk ribbons, everything from pillow shams and table covers to large quilts. The museum has in its collection wonderful examples of these items, including a smoking jacket made entirely from these 12-inch strips of ribbon. They're made from hundreds and hundreds of cigar ribbons, they're once tied around thousands of cigars. It's all silk. The stitching is a briar or a feather stitch. And a lot of times, like this jacket here, they used a stitch of contrasting color. The stitch in this particular instance is black, I want a bright yellow ribbon, it makes it stand out very nicely.

The smoking jacket is so unique and so rare. It's the only one I've seen of this condition, this quality has a nice black satin road collar with satin cuffs and the satin pockets and it has the frog in black. And then notice the purple stripes. The Museum of Tobacco Art in History is celebrating its 15th anniversary today, with a signature party for its new museum guidebook. The party starts at 11 and it will continue until 7 o'clock this evening. The public is cordially invited to attend. If you'd like more information, call the museum. The number is 271-2349. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bain. That gravelly voice, his incredible virtuosity on the cornette, no one established more

popular songs or influenced more musicians than Lewis Armstrong. He believed there could never be enough music in the world and he did his best to fill it with hot licks, soaring solos, stomping roaring rhythms and heartbreakingly sweet sounds. Noted author Lawrence Burrgrain has written a new biography titled Lewis Armstrong An Extravagant Life. He talked to Lewis' countless friends, read numerous books, articles and interviews, but his best source material was the man himself. Lewis throughout his life was a very talented writer.

Whenever he was backstage or in a hotel room which was 350 nights a year, he wild away the empty hours, typing, he would write 12-page single space letters, reminiscences, stories of growing up in the red light district of New Orleans, other jazz musicians, the bigotry encountered on the tours, friends he made along the way, both black and white. So I felt like I was putting together by gathering all this material pieces of a mosaic, the mosaic being his overall life. Now he published a small amount of this in his own lifetime. There was one autobiography he wrote called Satchmo, My Life in New Orleans, which came out in 1954, however it was somewhat expregated because he was a very body writer and he let it all out, whether it was his love of women or of marijuana or of gangsters. He held nothing back. In fact he liked to shot people in a very good natured way and that all comes through in his writing. Louis Armstrong projected a happy go lucky persona while performing, but what's remarkable

is how positive his attitude was offstage. Although his early years as a musician were very lean ones and his entire life, a constant battle over color barriers, he always felt himself blessed. His childhood in New Orleans was so deprived and so dekenzy and it's almost incredible. For example, his family was at more or less the bottom of the social scale. He was the grandson of slaves. His mother was illiterate, she worked as a laundress and a part-time prostitute, which he writes about. His first wife was a prostitute. Nevertheless despite all this deprivation, he insisted that this was the most wonderful childhood that anybody ever had. Many characters I think that most people would consider to be menacing, threatening or just not wholesome in some way. He loved. He had this gift for seeing what he considered to be the best in people. There was this odd thing about Louis. He was both very body and very profane and yet very spiritual at the same time. I think that comes through in his music.

You can hear those two extremes. Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans and miss it each night and day? I know I'm not wrong, the feelings get stronger the longer I stay away. Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans when that's where you left your heart? Louis was baptized to Roman Catholic. He often attended the Baptist church and he learned voodoo from his grandmother. But there was another religion which had a great influence on him as well. And he also felt an extraordinary affinity for Jews because he was virtually adopted by a family of Russian immigrant Jewish paddlers named the Karnopsky's.

When he was about seven years old and in his very formative years of seven to twelve spent a great deal of time working for the family and more or less living there because his own family was in total disarray. But this family did more than just take care of him. He got his first musical experience there because when he was working on their junk cart in the red light district of New Orleans the two brothers bought him a tin horn in order to attract attention to the cart as it went through the district selling coal and picking up rags. So there he was, perched the top of the cart, blowing the tin horn, attracting customers. Not only that, but he got his first exposure to singing when he was having dinner with the family in the evenings because they used to sing a lot. So there you have the two halves of his musical genius already being formed. Louis Armstrong has been called the Founding Father of Jazz. A tidal Lawrenceburg Greenfields is richly deserved. He more or less came to personify it, I think, for most Americans and then for the world. He invented the concept of the jazz solo.

He invented scat singing. He really was one of the first pioneers of swing. He was the first jazz musician to really record widely and popularize jazz. He just did more for jazz, almost anybody else. In terms of some of the other claimants, I think jazz has many fathers, has many mothers. There's certainly not one, although I think there may be one towering figure in Louis. That's the thing about Armstrong. He influenced virtually every other jazz musician. In fact, you could say that he influenced virtually every other popular musician, Black or White, when you think of people who were directly influenced by him. It's incredible. Billy Holiday, Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Bix Byter Beck, so many other people picked up their cues from listening to Louis. From hearing a live or studying his records, that he really had a great influence. Now, part of this was an accident. If he had been born 10 years earlier, he wouldn't have been able to record his widely. I think he would have been known more as a legend than a living presence. Because he did record from the time he was 21 years old, he did have this great influence.

Although his flaws and foibles are certainly present in this book, Louis Armstrong is obviously someone Lawrence Burgrin respects, admires, and likes very much. He was not only a trumpeter of great genius and creativity. He was a vocalist of equal genius and creativity, and also he was a wonderful man. Now a lot of people who are, you know, you admire, you admire them, they aren't so great when you put them under a microscope. When you start interviewing people as I did for this book over and over, hundreds of times and you say, well, what were they really like? And you hear one unpleasant story after another.

With Armstrong, all I heard no matter who I interviewed over and over, what a wonderful man. He was so lovely, he was so generous, he was so funny, that was what I heard over and I thought, well, this was really an extraordinary individual. Lawrence Burgrin, author of Louis Armstrong, an extravagant life. Lawrence Burgrin shares more stories and insights about Louis Armstrong this week on the fine print, broadcast Saturday at noon and Sunday morning at 9. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bain. All the shock has printed deep dip and he shows them a pretty wide, just such a night as my heat dear, and he keeps it outside when the shock bites when his deep dip scarlet pillows start spraying fancy gloves though, where's my heat dear? So there's not a trace of rain on the side of the wall, Sunday morning even, guys of

body. Artists can work for years exploring a single idea through their work. They can also take huge risks when they change their work to explore or expand a concept, especially when they're known for a particular style. And when the great sculptor Rodin changed his style a bit, his work got rejected. A well-known artist in Nashville, David Rebar, knows the joy and anticipation of breaking with the tradition of a signature style. Unlike some artists who've reached a degree of commercial success with a particular way of working, Rebar wants his work to always reflect new ideas. People want to buy a signature style. For me, I think art's supposed to be as much about an exploration of a number of ideas at once, and sometimes it won't mean more than a single kind of style or a single way of approaching subject, and that means that even your colors can have different aspects.

As he's explored new ideas, Rebar's style has changed a lot. I used to make boxes in fact, small shadow boxes like Joseph Cornell's work. Cornell made assemblages of found objects that he had a strong personal connection with. He placed the objects inside glass boxes. His collages and assemblages talked about his identification with being a caged spirit. Once I did that and got tired of the smell and the pain and the odor and the sand dust and everything else, I decided it was time to be a two-dimensional artist again. After Rebar turned toward two-dimensional art, he drew a series of hands before developing his latest body of work. I think art's not supposed to be just about one particular aspect or style or part of yourself. Rebar is a very somber and controlled and rational and, you know, gosh, melancholy. Some of those pieces have an elegic tone, and the others seem much more vibrant. Rebar says that regardless of how much his style of art making may change, there's a similar sensibility in all his pieces.

So when all these pieces have subtle, sensitive, nuanced things with much more brace of random destructive things, I want the things to be. The very least, they have to be beautiful to look at. They have to seduce my eyes in some way, and I want them to seduce other people's eyes as well. So I want to several things to go on in the image. It's supposed to be layered. It's supposed to have a kind of a ruined and destroyed effect. If someone is interested in looking at the ideas on a different level or exploring them and more devs, that's there too, and I want them to be beautiful but have some personality too. So, you know, after five minutes or up, you're going to still be interested. Rebar's latest body consists of vibrantly colored, beautiful figures intersected with geometric forms. And everything that's beautiful in geometry and some way influences our idea of what's beautiful and handsome for people. And that one drawing, for example, of circuit, the goddess who turned the dices men into swine, you could apply that to feminism if you wished and come up with some kind of analogy.

Me, I'm thinking also of this deduction aspect, the female principle, the idea of the female body and the idea of what beauty is by extension. Now Rebar's taking his work to another level. He's cropped his figures and is painting on much larger surfaces. I want these new ones to be more abstract and that the image is not going to be so specific like a body that you can tell where it is in space and that it's a whole or a more less whole portion of a body. I'd like them to be fragments like this, focusing on things like hands and feet or corners. So I guess more cropping that makes them in some ways more anonymous, but still specifically human so that you can relate to it. He refers to his old pieces as primers and his current work as a novel. I first started doing hands, it's like the body just slowly returned bit by bit. I did hands a whole series of hands for ten or twelve drawings and then slowly got more of the figure, the head, the back, the legs and so I got whole figures and now it's

like I'm moving back in the opposite direction, you know, whittling the body back down again. I'm only now more confident about drawing it. I'm Adrienne Outlaw for Nashville Public Radio. There'll be a change in the weather and a change in the sea from now on, there'll be a change in me, my walkroom. The National Finger Picking Guitar Champion Muriel Anderson is one of the featured players at this weekend's NAMM show. She will also host the All Star Guitar Night this Sunday at the Ryman Auditorium. She stopped by WPLN Studios earlier this week to tape an interview for our players and poets show. Muriel Anderson was raised in a musical family in Downers Grove, Illinois.

Her mother was a piano teacher and her grandfather was a saxophone player in John Philip Sousa's band. Muriel picked up the guitar at age ten, studied classical music and also played in Chicago area bluegrass bands. She took mandolin lessons from Jethro Burns, from the comedy duo Homer and Jethro. Jethro had a brother-in-law in Nashville by the name of Chet Atkins. They married identical twins, Jethro and Chet. This was back in Chicago and I played this tune called Nola for Jethro and Jethro said, well, you got to play that for my brother-in-law someday and so when he came to Chicago, I got together and played that for him and Chet said, well, I'll send you some songs you can play at your hotel gig. I was playing at the Park Hyatt Hotel there in Chicago at the time and of course I thought the greatest guitarist in the world is going to send me music to play at my hotel gig concert so I just smiled and nodded. Well a couple weeks passed by and I got this tape in the mail of all things that Chet had

recorded in his basement for me. He really inspired me a lot and we were sending tapes back and forth until I started coming here commuting to Nashville and trying to learn what I could from Chet and from his friends. He recorded just a couple of little things on the Aureoso from Paris album. I was just recording it here in Nashville and he stopped into the studio and said, well, why don't you put this part on here and so I said, well, and he sat down and put in a second part to Rosalie. Muriel Anderson has recorded four CDs, made an instructional video, played with symphony orchestras and performed solo concerts around the world. Nashville Luthier, Paul McGill, has even created the Muriel Anderson model classical guitar. That's the guitar she plays but her repertoire covers many styles of music. A lot of people think that I'm a classical player but I actually didn't start classical

till college. I played Bluegrass and Folk and Jazz before that. It was the only way I could study guitar and college and I didn't expect that I'd fall in love with the style so much. And a lot of the techniques and the approaches to music, I've used towards a real wide variety of music and it really does enrich a lot of music if you still can keep the character, the original character of the music. This Sunday night, Muriel Anderson will host the all-star guitar night at the Ryman Auditorium featuring among many guests. With James Burton from Elvis Presley's band, Lawrence Juper of Paul McCartney and Wings, and John McHughan from the nitty-gritty Dirt Band, the show will benefit Gildes Club Nashville, a support group for cancer patients and their families.

Tickets are available at the Ryman box office, ticket master, Sam's music, cotton music, and corner music stores. Here are the rest of my interview with Muriel Anderson on players and poets this Saturday at 9 p.m. I'm Steve Key for Nashville Public Radio. The same company that brought us ads about Rogaine, the hair restoration drug, is now back with the new Mini-Infermercial. A couple of two-minute ads tout the injectable contraceptive depro-provera. Share we plan to have another child, but not before Kelly learns to tire shoes. When it comes to building a family, if you want to be sure of your plans, be sure of your birth control.

Find out about depro-provera contraceptive injection. Commercial is shot home video style, showing young parents a family barbecue and a surprise birthday party. Joan Sonopoli is Senior Vice President for H.M.C. consumer, which developed the ad for Pharmacia and Upjohn. To show the various times in a woman's life when she may be considering or reconsidering her method of birth control, and how it helps that particular woman achieve, you know, her life plans, her plans in relation to her family. And so we isolated really three different periods of a woman's life, a young working woman, a young mom who was looking to space her children. And an older mom who's a family, you know, as she considers it, her family is complete. Sonopoli says Nashville was chosen as a test market, along with Columbus, Ohio, Kansas City, and Seattle, because it has a definable and measurable television market. And sales of depro-provera are already above average here.

Vanderbilt marketing professor Roland Russ says it's obvious the company is targeting two distinct markets, the married family planning market and the single birth control market. He says the company could also be testing how well the sad is accepted by the Nashville audience. It's a potentially explosive sort of ad in the Bible belt. And I think that's one of the reasons why the advertising copy is so family-oriented. Really just about everything in the ad is very family-oriented with the exception of that one woman who they kind of sneak in there as a single woman, but they don't really mention her at all. They don't really let her talk about why she's using it very much. So I think you're right, I think they're looking to find out what kind of reaction they're going to get from the Bible belt.

See whether the religious leaders are going to come out in mass and boycott or what. But Pharmacian up John's Bill Walker says the company doesn't expect much of a backlash. Walker directs women's healthcare marketing for the drug maker. Our goal was to present these commercials from a creative standpoint in a very upright and forthright way. Because we know that women are continuing to seek options. We know that unintended pregnancy is in fact a major social and economic issue in this country. And so we were attempting to keep everything in a mainstream perspective. We think that if there's going to be backlash, that it would be minimal at best. The company looks to boost sales by introducing the drug to the mass market through television. Their research shows that 40% of the targeted women for this drug don't read newspapers or magazines. And of the women who do, television is the more immediate medium. But in order to get its message across, Pharmacian up John took a risk. According to FDA rules, in order to mention both the brand name and what the drug does,

the company has to also mention potential risks and side effects. Almost half of the two minute ads is a scroll of such risks. Again, Joan Sonopoli. Most advertisers elect either to do the brand name, but not tell you what it's about. And Claretin allergy medicine is a good example of that where they keep saying Claretin, but they never tell you that it's an allergy drug and how you should take it or anything like that. But there are a number of drugs that will not give you the brand name of the drug, but they will give you, they will talk about the condition, that of treats, and then they will supply you with an 800 number and it will be sponsored by a company and not by a brand name drug. So we elected to show both our brand name depot Rivera and talk about contraception. Professor Roland Russ says the scroll is a distraction, but overall he says the drug maker will probably get a good idea about the impact of its hand.

They're not going to be able to take this and then project exactly what's going to happen with their sales or exactly what's going to happen in every little town across the country that they might show this in, but at least if Nashville more or less tolerates it, then they can feel a little bit more confident about having things in the South. The two ads will air for the next three weeks on WTVF, Channel 5, WUXP, Channel 30 and WZTV, Channel 17. WKRN Channel 2 turned down the commercial, calling it issue advertising. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Anita Bogg. Nobody needs an expert to list all the stress factors we encounter every day, but some of us may need expert advice to help alleviate that stress, which is why the Baptist Mind

Body Medical Institute is sponsoring a free seminar this evening titled Stress to Death, the Disease of the 90s. Dr. Patricia Akari is clinical director at the Mind Body Institute of Beth Israel, Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. As featured speaker at the seminar, she will be educating the audience about stress. She starts with a thinking process that I think up till this point, people have probably assumed that their thinking has been pretty innocuous. Thoughts go through your mind and they come and they go and they're hearing their gone and that's the end of it. But what the thinking process actually does is stimulate a number of physical responses within the body. So for example, if you are feeling frightened or anxious about something, a number of different physical reactions happen within the body. The brain processes the thought that I'm anxious. And then it impacts on the autonomic nervous system, which produces harmful chemicals,

which create rises in blood pressure and heart rate. It also impacts the muscular skeletal system, which causes muscles to contract and muscle tension to develop and impacts another type of nervous system, which is responsible for releasing harmful kinds of chemicals into the blood that impact the immune system. So all of these bodily responses occur most of the time without our awareness in response to thinking that happens all the time every day, every moment. Not everybody thinks stress is a problem. Many people on the fast track career paths say they need the pressure to perform. Dr. Akari agrees that some stress can be a good thing. Up to a point, as we're feeling anxious, performance can indeed increase. The key is to be able to realize when enough is enough. Your performance can increase proportionately to the amount of stress that you're feeling

until you get to a max, until you just become overwhelmed and then performance bottoms out precipitously. I mean, it just drops off. So what we need to do is understand ourselves well enough to figure out what that point of, enough as enough is. What physical symptoms can indicate a person is suffering from stress? Lots. Things like headache and backache and cold hands and sleeping problems and difficult relationships with people. The list is endless. It actually includes all of those kind of nuisance illnesses that we kind of deal with on a day-to-day basis from the smallest little pain or the muscle tension in our neck to the stomach problems that cause us indigestion and irritable bowel and inability to tolerate foods to the nervousness and shakiness that sometimes we feel to cold, sweaty hands, stress impacts every area of our lives.

Emotionally, physically, relationship-wise, spiritually, if you can see that these symptoms have their basis in stress, then you can begin to implement techniques that will give you some control over them because we can impact on the way that we respond to stress. It was Dr. Akari's colleague, Dr. Herbert Benson, who first recognized and defined the relaxation response to stress and its healing effects on the body. The relaxation therapy can be any one of a number of techniques depending upon which one the patient finds most beneficial. Dr. Akari will be sharing these techniques with tonight's audience. There are a number of techniques which can be used to elicit relaxation response. Just as they talk about the flight or flight response being the mechanism where the body responds to stress, the relaxation response is the opposite of the flight or flight response. It is a decrease in arousal.

It's a technique that allows the blood pressure to decrease and the heart rate to decrease and breathing to decrease and brings about a state of relaxation. While stress reduction can benefit anyone, those who have chronic problems connected to stress are usually the most eager to try the relaxation response. Again, Dr. Patricia Akari. That's what 99% of our patients say that they have suffered for so long, they don't have any choice. They need to learn these things. So we are able to show them another way. The free seminar is tonight from 6 until 8 at Baptist Hospital. For more information or to make reservations, call the institute. The phone number is 284-6463. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bain. It's sometimes hard to say what's worse, driving on a road that feels like you're riding

on a jackhammer or boiling in the sun with hundreds of others unexpectedly stuck behind a road crew. This summer, the latter may be the norm here in Nashville, as the state spends millions of dollars repairing and expanding roadways and interstates in Davidson County. It's like upkeep on your home, okay? There's really no good time to go out and do it, but it still has to be done. Very street? Yes, that's her name. Is with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, T-DOT. The good thing is, most of this stuff is going to be finished this summer. So, next summer, you all won't have to worry about it. Motorists will be able to drive through, but the bridge work has to be done and the maintenance work and the patching of the road and concrete and things like that, you know, it's just got to be done. Street says most of what we're seeing this summer is much needed repair work, not expansion of our current system. We have bridges and roads in Nashville are 20 to 30 years old, and it's been decades since they were repaired.

Traffic reporter John Hall has had an eye on Nashville transit for eight years. He says this season's construction gridlock is a little more pronounced. I know that this season we're going to be having repair work done on every single thoroughfare, major artery in this county, 40, both directions, both sides of the city, 65, north and south, 24, east and west, 440 is going to have some work done, 265, they're doing the bridge repair now, plus they're building the 840 loop, so, I mean, it's everywhere. For drivers creeping slowly across the church street bridge, it gets a little frustrating. Only one lane in each direction is open on the bridge over I-40. They haven't done anything. They tore it up, three, four days gone by, they haven't done anything. My wife's from here, and we have two small children, and she is about to have her third, and I'm afraid to get stuck in traffic here. I really hate to even be out downtown anywhere at all. Coming in was fine, but I noticed when I was coming in that it was bumper to bumper for

as far as I could see, going out towards Bellevue. So what does that tell you in your way home? I'll be going home later than usual, or I'll take the inner side. Hard to do, isn't it? Many drivers complain of last-minute signs warning of construction, of driving through a construction jam, only to see no work going on, of traffic lights that stay on the same timing rotation, even though traffic flow has changed. And why, many ask, why can't we be like St. New York, where road construction continues through the night? T-Dots carry street. We try to, whenever possible, to utilize the evenings, however, there are some complications that come with that. First of all, the lighting. You have to put in a lot of light out there for these contractors to do that work, and that can be very expensive. The other problem is safety. That's safety for both the motorist and for the worker. At least one motorist sitting on the church street bridge says if it's going to cost more,

forget it. If my taxes go up, I'll sit in traffic. I'll figure out a easier way to do it, to get there. Some people need to just use their brains and figure out a better way to get places sometimes. Leave earlier. Metro police say the number of accidents increases dramatically during this season, mainly fender benders at places such as church street, where drivers come around a blind curve, and to traffic backed up on entrance ramps. Lieutenant Glenn Yates of the Traffic Division says he has a contingency of motorcycle officers set aside for construction areas to respond quickly to collisions and get traffic flowing again. Nashville is a, thank goodness, is a strong tourist attraction. Tourism here, we've got the three major interstates that emerge here, which brings a lot of traffic, meaning people have to come through Nashville and get from point A to point B. And then Nashville has grown a lot, and we've experienced a lot more traffic on our interstates systems. The fact that you put construction in place, it can be a big problem and it's a big problem, but you have to sacrifice.

You've got to make those sacrifices for improvements. The best thing to do this summer is listen to the radio and read the newspaper for updates on construction sites, and allow yourself plenty of time to make it through the city, especially on Saturdays and Sundays. Our rainy spring and early summer push construction back, and our contractors are trying to make up lots of work on the weekend. Every street says motorists can help improve the road system by keeping in touch with T dot. If you see traffic lights that aren't working properly, potholes, down guard rails, warning signs to the wrong place, give T dot's office of information a call. That number is 741-2331-741-2331. In 1983, she was named Female Vocalist of the Year by the Academy of Country Music. She recorded six albums, which sold over 4 million records, and her version of Nobody

was number one on the country charts, selling more than 2 million singles. But in 1987, Sylvia Hutton did something really extraordinary. She left the road, parked her high-profile career, and sought the quiet life in Nashville. When you're on the road, you're in a little cubicle of a bus most of the time, and you're not really connected with the real world. And after eight years of that, I couldn't tell you what it had to let us cost at the grocery store. I wanted to get a real life, get grounded in a everyday existence that was fertile ground from which to write. And that's what I've been doing. I had no idea it would be this many years before I'd actually put out a record again, but that's how long it took. So when you follow your heart, who knows where it's going to take you, but here I am. In fact, it's been 10 years since Sylvia recorded an album.

After such a lengthy hiatus, you might think it was tough to sell herself to the big record labels. You'd be right. I did go around a lot of the major labels and knock on some doors, talk to some folks, but I didn't seem to get very much interest. Most of the industry seems to be focused on signing the younger artists, which I understand because I was 21 when I was signed with RCA. So when I didn't get any interest there, I thought, well, you know, I could sit around and just keep knocking on doors and keep knocking on doors, and I'm getting the message here that there's no interest there. So what am I going to do? I thought, well, I believe in me, OK, I'll just make my own record. John Mock, Sylvia's longtime friend, a companyist and a ranger, believed in her too. Together they have produced a CD titled The Real Story. And Sylvia wrote seven of its 13 tracks. She also came up with a name for her fledgling record label. Back in the mid to late 80s, I went back to this place that I lived for about six months when I was five years old. I saw this little piece of plastic sticking up out of the ground. I dug it up and it was this little pony I played with when I lived there.

It's really an incredible thing that I found this. Had little teeth marks in the legs. It was just an amazing thing. I found it. I found it about the time that I was deciding I was going to wind down and stop touring and stop recording and do some writing. So a few months back when I was trying to figure out what to name my record label, it just dawned on me. Red pony records. Because this little pony symbolizes, in a lot of ways, the journey that I've been on in the last few years, going back and digging up something authentic about myself as a singer, as a writer, as an artist, as a person in the world. The real story has some tracks with drums and electric guitars and a rockabilly beat, but most are much simpler, sweeter. Taking their time, Sylvia Hutton and John Mock left the music evolve in a way that felt right.

It just seems like that as we have grown with this material over the last few years, some songs lend themselves better to a whole band, other songs lend themselves just to maybe a vocal guitar and cello or vocal guitar and violin. And it's so wonderful to have that kind of freedom to say, we don't have to put a whole band on every track on this record. This record was not made in a factory kind of mode. We really did let the song dictate how it needed to be recorded, and that's so fun to let that happen that way. It feels so much more creative. Now that she's back in the business, as Sylvia Hutton looking to be country music's top female artist again, she wouldn't mind, but it's no longer her top priority. After having a really good taste of what it's like to have success with music, and it is a wonderful thing, there's more to life than just that. There's more to life than just music. I have a wonderful relationship now, and I walk my dog twice a day, and I go to the grocery store, and I just value this thing so much now.

After having not had them for several years, it's like, now I'm finding some kind of balance with my life. There's music, there's my home life, there's the touring, there's the recording, and I'm finally, at this time of my life, finding a balance that feels good to me. Sylvia Hutton, who's new CD on the Red Pony label, is titled The Real Story. Sylvia will be performing tomorrow night at 8 o'clock at Cafe Milano. For Nashville Public Radio, I'm Rebecca Bain. There's a light in the window, a log on the fire, and naked my heart, and this longing

and desire to be whole.