Tonight’s live broadcast, “You Have a Home, Part 2,” is a community update and a homecoming message for Blues People. We’re sharing what’s next as we prepare to live broadcast on WPBR, We The Blues People Radio Network, and the Reflexive Podcast on Patreon, expanding the ways our community can gather, learn, and stay connected.We’ll walk through the rhythm of our programming, our Thursday night show and Sunday night show, and connect it to the larger African American Folklorist ecosystem, an archive and a Well, rooted in cultural memory, story, sound, and community-led stewardship. Come in, tap in, and welcome home.

Tony Kail, Memphis Hoodoo, and the Spiritual Traditions of the Black SouthWhat is Black American Folk Belief? And what does it have to do with the Blues?In this episode, cultural anthropologist and author Tony Kail, whose work documenting Memphis Hoodoo and the Beale Street Hoodoo History and Folklife Museum helps preserve the stories of African American healers, rootworkers, and spiritual practitioners whose traditions supported Black communities for generations, joins the podcast to discuss:• Black American Folk Belief as cultural knowledge• The connection between Blues music and spiritual traditions• Memphis Hoodoo and the cultural world of Beale Street• How land, environment, and Southern space shaped Black tradition• The role of rootworkers and healers in Black community survival• Why folklore documentation matters todayThis episode is part of the Jack Dappa Blues mission to document the intellectual traditions, cultural memory, and lived experiences of Blues People.Jack Dappa Blues is not just about music.It’s about the people, the land, the memory, and the knowledge that made the Blues possible.Subscribe for more conversations on:Blues History • Black Folklore • Cultural Preservation • Ethnomusicology • African American Traditional MusicJoin our community:► Support Jack Dappa Blues on Patreon► Join The African American Folklorist community► Attend our workshops and courses► Sponsorship and underwriting opportunities availableJack Dappa Blues – Preserving the Blues People, one voice, one story, one tradition at a time.

Presented by: Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation
In partnership with The African American Folklorist

This in-depth session brings together leaders grounded in Indigenous identity, tribal sovereignty, and reclamation work to guide participants through the process of connecting and reconnecting families to tribal ancestry.

💬 One powerful takeaway?
Blood quantum doesn’t equal identity. In this conversation, we unpack how someone can be recorded as having no blood quantum in the Cherokee Nation — not because they aren’t Indigenous, but because they’re from a different tribal nation (like Muscogee Creek). It’s a detail that seems small but carries deep implications for how ancestry is recorded, denied, or erased.

This master class covers:

• Navigating Freedmen and tribal records

• Understanding rejection letters as historical archives

• Misclassification in blood quantum and tribal rolls

• Using the Guion-Miller and Dawes Rolls to uncover family stories

• How Black and Indigenous communities intersect in these histories

📺 Now streaming for paid members.
Support the work. Reclaim the knowledge. Restore the lineage.

What does it mean to speak the truth of the Blues on the very soil where our ancestors were enslaved?

In this live broadcast, Lamont Jack Pearley—traditional Bluesman, folklorist, and founder of the Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation—reflects on being invited to present his original scholarship on Blues Ecology at Hopson Plantation, once home to Blues legend Pinetop Perkins.

As we close out Black Music History Month, this episode holds space for a necessary conversation about land, memory, and music. We'll explore how different landscapes—Mississippi’s cotton fields and Louisiana’s red-light districts—shaped different kinds of Blues, and why where we honor the Blues matters just as much as how we do it.

Through personal reflection, fieldwork excerpts, and live performance, we ask:
Can you celebrate the Blues without honoring the history that created it?

Join us tonight for truth-telling, music, and memory from the Delta to the mic.

Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Radio presents:Mojo Workin’: Dr. Katrina Hazzard-Donald on Hoodoo, Blues, and the Black Belt TraditionIn this culturally rich and significant episode of Jack Dappa Blues Radio, we welcome renowned folklorist, sociologist, and dance scholar Dr. Katrina Hazzard-Donald for an in-depth discussion on Black Belt Hoodoo, Blues culture, and African American sacred traditions.In this episode, we explore:The African origins and survival of Hoodoo as a metaphysical systemThe jook joint as a sacred space of spirit, resistance, and joyHow Blues music operates as ritual, cosmology, and cultural memoryThe overlap between Dr. Hazzard-Donald’s work and the Blues Ecology frameworkDr. Hazzard-Donald is the author of Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System and Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture. She is a professor emerita at Rutgers University, a Yoruba/Lukumi initiate, and a lifelong cultural worker dedicated to preserving and interpreting Black Southern lifeways.🪕 Hosted by Lamont Jack Pearley, traditional Blues artist, applied folklorist, and founder of Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation.Become a Patreon🔗 Visit us at: https://www.patreon.com/jackdappablues💬 Share your thoughts in the comments and help amplify Black traditional knowledge.🎧 Subscribe for more episodes that center Black folklore, cultural heritage, and Blues history.

Creole Roots, Sinners, and Gravediggers

Bluesman, actor, and cultural preservationist Chris Thomas King joins Jack Dappa Blues Radio to uncover the real story of the Blues — from the juke joints of Louisiana to the haunting depths of Gravedigger Gonna Cut You Down.

We talk Creole identity, his film Sinners, the founding of the Blues Origin Institute, and why the Blues didn’t start in the Delta — it started in Louisiana.

This is the Blues you weren’t taught. The Blues that remembers.

▶️ Available now on all streaming platforms.
#ChrisThomasKing #CreoleBlues #JackDappaBlues #BluesPeople #BluesOriginInstitute #BlackMusicMonth

Each month, The African American Folklorist honors a Black scholar whose life’s work is immersed in the deep study and preservation of African American folkways, knowledge systems, and community truth-telling. For June, we recognize Dr. Elisha Oliver, a biocultural anthropologist, visual ethnographer, and Executive Director of Texas Folklife, as our African American Folklorist of the Month.Dr. Oliver’s scholarship is rooted in lived experience, land memory, and embodied care. Her work crosses the fields of anthropology, folklore, health equity, and the arts, tracing the relationships between space, place, food environments, and Black wellness traditions. Through rigorous fieldwork and visual storytelling, she brings to light the narratives often overlooked in mainstream academia and institutional folklore.In this episode, we’ll explore how Dr. Oliver uses film, photography, and the spoken word to document the intersections of storytelling, traditional healing, and environmental sustainability. We’ll discuss her contributions to the American Folklore Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and her role as a Zora Neale Hurston Award winner and Wenner-Gren Public Scholar Fellow. And we'll go deep, into land as medicine, Black maternal health, and the importance of centering community in every research question asked.https://texasfolklife.org/[email protected]

The Blues as Black Sonic Folklore: Part 2:"Hard Ground and High Water: The Blues of Survival and Struggle"We continue our Black Music Month series by diving into the Blues as a witness to environmental crisis and class struggle.Featuring music by Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lead Belly, we explore how songs about flood, drought, and urban segregation serve as time capsules, preserving Black ecological, economic, and emotional history through sound. These are more than Blues, they are survival songs, testimonies of people shaped by both nature and the systems that fail them.

In this episode of Jack Dappa Blues Radio, we welcome Kandia Crazy Horse, Afro-Indigenous musician, rock critic, author, and frontwoman of the genre-defying band Cactus Rose NYC. From the newsroom to the stage, Kandia has blazed a singular trail across rock, country, and Americana—reclaiming sound as a site of cultural sovereignty, survival, and storytelling.We dive into her legacy as editor of Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock ’n’ Roll, her academic work at Princeton University, and her bold mission to center Afro-Indigenous identity in American roots music. Her concept of “sonic sovereignty” challenges colonial gatekeeping in music, and her voice—both literal and literary—carries the spirit of revolution.🎶 Listen to Kandia Crazy Horse’s music:👉 Spotify – “Gravedigger Gonna Cut You Down” Spotify - "Cactus Rose NYC" 🔗 Featured Topics:Afro-Indigenous identity in musicReclaiming Americana and country bluesThe politics of sound and representationCactus Rose NYC and creative freedomRip It Up and the Black Rock archiveCultural revolt in music journalism and academia

In this kickoff episode for Black Music Month, Jack Dappa Blues Radio explores the Blues as Black folklore, not just as music, but as cultural testimony, survival strategy, and sonic memory. Through the voices of Tommy Johnson, Mance Lipscomb, Rube Lacy, Charley Patton, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, we treat Blues lyrics as living archives, capturing addiction, emotional depth, environmental trauma, and coded cultural critique.We examine the Blues as testimony, as ecological witness, and as class commentary, diving into how metaphor, moan, and memory serve as vital tools for storytelling and resistance.This episode honors the spirit of Black Music Month by placing tradition bearers front and center, revealing how the Blues doesn't just recall history—it makes it.🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/6735755289559040

🎙️ REPLAY: The Blues Narrative — The Next Chapter of the Slave Narratives

Originally aired: Late March Broadcast | 9 PM CST
Presented by: Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation
In partnership with The African American Folklorist and We The Blues People

We are proud to share the full replay of our special broadcast that launched a new chapter in our cultural memory work — The Blues Narrative.

This powerful episode explores the lived experiences of the Children of The Great Migration — the Blues People whose lives carry the rhythms of survival, resistance, and Black cultural power in the face of systemic oppression.

In this broadcast, you’ll experience:

• 🎤 First-hand accounts and oral histories from tradition-bearers

• 🎶 Blues soundscapes that score our shared historical memory

• 📚 Critical theory grounded in Black ecological, cultural, and musical traditions

• 🗣️ Reflections on how the Blues functions as both archive and resistance

This series is the continuation of the Slave Narratives — a living archive voiced by those who inherited the legacy and forged new paths through song, story, and sound.

📡 Available now to members.

Your support helps us preserve, publish, and share the Black oral tradition — rooted in the real lives of our elders, our communities, and our future.

👉🏾 Join us, support the work, and be part of the Blues Narrative.