For the February 2026 feature on The African American Folklorist (AAF), we’re in conversation with Mahoganee—the Gullah/Geechee Lowcountry “Sea Island Songbird”—and her husband/producer André “Mr. Bounce Back” Amigér. Together, they create what they call Indigenous Soul Music: a trans-Atlantic, heritage-rooted sound that blends jazz (Black classical), funk, blues, hip-hop, and West African/Caribbean influence into living storytelling.In this episode, Mahoganee and Mr. Bounce Back speak on what it means to be Sound Griots and Sound Healers—using creativity and imagination as tools of liberation, wellness, and cultural preservation. We discuss Gullah/Geechee cultural memory, voice as archive, the ethics of carrying tradition forward, and how their work connects art to land and water stewardship. They also share how their nonprofit Responsible ARTistry, Inc. mentors youth through arts education, leadership, self-awareness, and community responsibility.🎙️ Episode Title: Indigenous Soul Music: Mahoganee & Mr. Bounce Back, Sound Griots of the Lowcountry📌 Topics include: Gullah/Geechee heritage • sound healing • roots music • arts education • stewardship • Afro-futurism, “portals,” and time travel • cultural preservation through performanceIf this conversation moves you, please like, subscribe, and share—and drop a comment: What does “heritage as responsibility” mean to you?Follow / Learn MoreMahogonee: The Mahoganee Xperience https://themahoganeexperience.com/homeResponsible ARTistry, Inc.: Arts education + mentorship initiativeshttps://www.responsibleartistry.org/Become a Member of the African American Folklorist Ecosystemhttps://theafricanamericanfolklorist....#AfricanAmericanFolklorist #AAF #GullahGeechee #Lowcountry #IndigenousSoulMusic #RootsMusic #SoundHealing #CulturalPreservation #FolkMusic #BlackFolklife #ArtsEducation #EnvironmentalJustice #LandStewardship #Afrofuturism

On Jack Dappa Blues Radio & TV, Lamont Jack Pearley walks two trails at once: the Blues Trail and the Bloodline Trail.Beginning with the image and memory of his great-great-great grandmother Susan Nash, this broadcast explores how Black family history, Indigenous memory, oral tradition, land, and the Blues are deeply connected. Through the lens of Prison Planet, Blues Ecology, and the Blues Narrative, this episode asks: what did our people know about themselves before the records named us wrong?We’ll discuss Blues legends and roots artists whose stories open conversations around Indigenous ancestry, Native land memory, Black Southern history, and American roots music — including Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf, Lowell Fulson, Scrapper Blackwell, Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix, Pura Fé, Martha Redbone, Aaron Neville, and more.We’ll also carefully examine artists such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and R.L. Burnside, not to claim what cannot yet be proven, but to explore the Indigenous land, Black labor, plantation memory, migration, and survival ecology that shaped the music.This episode is also an introduction to tracing your own family’s Indigenous memory through what Lamont calls The Three Trails Method: the Paper Trail, the People’s Trail, and the Sound Trail.This is genealogy.This is cultural preservation.This is family legacy.This is the Blues Narrative returning our attention to our own story.Follow the records. Listen to the elders. Preserve the story.

This January episode of The African American Folklorist opens the year with a powerful conversation with Dr. Daniel E. Atkinson, independent ethnomusicologist and cultural documentarian. This interview is about more than one project — it’s about sound, memory, cultural responsibility, and what ethical listening looks like when you’re documenting Black life and carrying stories that outlive you.We discuss Dr. Atkinson’s long-term research in Louisiana, including his work at Angola State Penitentiary, a former slave plantation turned into the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, and what it reveals about Black vernacular expression inside the plantation–prison continuum. But we also go beyond Angola into his broader documentation of Louisiana tradition bearers: woodcarvers, painters, foodway practitioners, and community elders, people whose knowledge is held in the hands as much as the mouth.We also dig into his landmark book:The Rediscovery of George “Nash” Walker: The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America (SUNY Press) — a recovery of Black theater history, cultural strategy, and the fight for narrative control in an America built to erase our brilliance.This conversation sets the tone for the year: community-led, community-fed. We talk self-preservation in the field, Black access vs. white access, institutional gatekeeping, and what it means to do this work with integrity, outside the academy and inside the lived reality of Blackness.👇🏾 Drop a comment: What does cultural responsibility mean to you?📌 Subscribe for more AAF conversations + Blues Narrative / Blues Ecology content.🔗 Find Dr. Atkinson: LinkedIn (Daniel E. Atkinson, PhD)📚 Book: SUNY Press + major retailers

On Jack Dappa Blues Radio, we discuss Black Music History Month through a cultural and traditional news lens. We are not simply celebrating Black music as entertainment. We are listening to Black music as testimony, archive, field report, ancestral memory, spiritual technology, resistance practice, environmental record, and survival map. This program connects Black Music History Month to the Blues People, Blues Ecology, Blues Narrative, and the ongoing reality of what we are calling the prison planet — the systems of confinement that have shaped Black life from the plantation and convict leasing to prison farms, policing, surveillance, displacement, and mass incarceration. Tonight’s central question: What has Black music been trying to tell the world all along?

Tonight’s episode is a reflexive conversation on the importance of the Blues Music is Black History series, now expanding into the fuller truth that Blues music is also Indigenous history. This conversation grows out of my second year presenting the Blues Music is Black History panel/conversation at the Pinetop Perkins Workshop Experience on Hopson Plantation, a place tied to the labor, memory, and cultural survival of Black people in the South.But this conversation is bigger than one plantation, one camp, or one performance. It is about what happens when we tell the truth about the Blues as a music born from land, labor, migration, survival, spirituality, and resistance. It is about the country Blues, the plantation, the field, the juke joint, the church, the railroad, the levee camp, the front porch, and the Black communities that carried memory through sound.It is also about Indigenous history, because the Blues did not emerge from empty land. The South itself carries Indigenous memory, removal, land struggle, cultural exchange, and survival. When we talk about the Blues, the plantation, and the South, we are also talking about land that already held Indigenous nations, Indigenous knowledge, and Indigenous relationships to place before plantation capitalism reshaped it through violence.This episode asks: how do we get to healing without telling the truth? How do we honor the Blues without reducing it to entertainment? How do we play the dance music without erasing the country Blues? And who has the right to tell Black representatives how to speak about our own story?Blues music is not just music. It is Black history. It is Indigenous history. It is Southern history. It is labor history. It is land memory. And it is one of the clearest ways we can hear how a people survived, remembered, resisted, and transformed the world.

On Jack Dappa Blues, we gathered on July 5th, 2026 — the same date Frederick Douglass delivered his historic 1852 address at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, now remembered by the piercing question: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”As America celebrates 250 years of birth, independence, and nationhood, we ask a deeper question:What to the Blues People is America’s 250th birthday?This episode explores the contradiction between national celebration and Black historical memory. We will discuss Frederick Douglass, July 4th, cotton, slavery, racial reclassification, Black Indigenous history, and the commodification of Black culture, tradition, labor, bodies, and sound.We will also move through the idea of the “swarthy mahogany American Indian” as part of a buried ancestral conversation — not as a detour from the Blues, but as part of the same story of land, bloodline, complexion, memory, naming, misnaming, and survival.Through the paper trail, the people’s trail, and the sound trail, this broadcast asks what America celebrates, what it conceals, and what the Blues continues to testify.Because the Fourth of July has fireworks.But the Blues have memory.The nation may celebrate 250 years of birth, but the Blues People carry the testimony of the land, the labor, the names, the songs, and the ancestors America tried to rename.The paper trail may misname us, but the sound trail remembers us.

Dr. Paulette Richards, our African American Folklorist of the Month for December 2025, brings a powerful blend of scholarship, artistry, and cultural memory to her work in African American puppetry and object performance. In this episode, we explore her trilogy of puppet films—Blacks and Bays, Men and Mules, and Worth Her Salt—and the accompanying EP Soul Songs: Remembrance, Resilience, Resistance, which reimagines ancestral folk songs as acts of remembrance and resistance. Through puppetry, Dr. Richards confronts the harsh histories of enslavement, convict leasing, and the ongoing afterlife of mass incarceration, creating enough emotional distance for audiences to engage deeply with traumatic truths. Her practice, shaped by diasporic study in Senegal, dance training, francophone sensibilities, and decades of teaching, challenges dominant visual narratives and restores agency to Black representation. This episode honors Dr. Richards as a visionary whose work transforms low-tech materials into high-impact storytelling, illuminating the resilience, creativity, and unbroken spirit of the Blues People.

What does it mean to become a folklorist? How do stories, rumors, family traditions, and everyday objects become archives of Black history? In this special episode of Jack Dappa Blues, host Lamont Jack Pearley sits down with one of the most influential voices in African American folklore, Dr. Patricia A. Turner, for an inspiring conversation about scholarship, mentorship, and the enduring power of Black cultural expression.

From her earliest encounters with folklore as a student to her groundbreaking contributions to the field, Dr. Turner reflects on the people, experiences, and questions that shaped her remarkable career. She shares how folklore became a lens for understanding Black life—not simply through songs and stories, but through the rumors we circulate, the objects we treasure, the quilts we stitch, the sayings we repeat, and the traditions we pass from one generation to the next.

Together, Lamont and Dr. Turner explore the rich terrain of African American folklore, discussing the cultural significance of rumor and legend, the social realities behind some of America's most recognizable urban legends, the importance of material culture, and the ways Black communities have long used narrative as a form of protection, resilience, and collective memory. Their conversation also examines representation in scholarship, the responsibilities of public folklorists, and the importance of documenting Black life on Black communities' own terms.

Beyond her celebrated books—including I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Whispers on the Color Line, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies, Crafted Lives, and Trash Talk—Dr. Turner offers deeply personal reflections on teaching, mentoring, overcoming self-doubt, and creating opportunities for future generations of folklorists. Her insights remind us that folklore is not confined to archives or classrooms; it lives wherever people gather, remember, create, and share their experiences.

This episode is more than an interview—it is a masterclass in African American folklore and an invitation to rethink the stories that shape our communities. Whether you are a student, educator, cultural worker, artist, historian, or simply someone who values Black history and cultural heritage, this conversation offers a profound appreciation for the knowledge embedded in everyday life.

Join us as we celebrate Dr. Patricia A. Turner, our African American Folklorist of the Month, and honor a lifetime dedicated to preserving, interpreting, and elevating the richness of Black folklore. Through her scholarship and mentorship, Dr. Turner continues to open doors, inspire new generations, and remind us that our stories are among our greatest cultural treasures.

https://www.patriciaaturner.com/

Jack Dappa Blues Radio honors Libby Rae Watson—an authentic Blues woman, guitarist, songwriter, cultural witness, and keeper of Mississippi Blues memory.Since the early 1970s, Libby Rae has built deep relationships with some of the most important figures in traditional Blues, including Big Joe Williams, Furry Lewis, Eugene Powell, Houston Stackhouse, Stonewall Mays, and her close friend and mentor, Sam Chatmon.In 1978, she helped organize the talent for the very first Delta Blues Festival in Greenville, Mississippi, bringing together elders whose music carried the memory of Black Southern life, labor, survival, humor, migration, and resistance.This special broadcast explores Libby Rae’s journey into the Mississippi Delta, the musicians who trusted and taught her, and the responsibility that comes with carrying tradition forward. Through music, memories, photographs, and personal stories, we look beyond the stage to honor the friendships and cultural relationships that shaped her life.Libby Rae Watson’s story reminds us that the Blues is more than a sound. It is a breathing Black cultural inheritance rooted in people, place, memory, and community.Join us as we give flowers to a woman who listened, learned, showed up, remembered the elders, and continued to speak their names.The Blues Found Her: Libby Rae Watson and the Keepers of the Delta Flamehttps://www.libbyrae.com/Presented by Jack Dappa Blues RadioPreserving the Blues People, one voice and one story at a time.

WHAT’S HAPPENING, BLUES PEOPLE?If you don’t know me from nothing, you know me from that statement. Every month we celebrate our African American Folklorist of the Month—lifting up culture-keepers whose work sits at the crossroads of tradition, scholarship, and community.This episode honors Brandi Waller-Pace (they/she)—Fort Worth–based musician, educator, scholar-activist, Founder/Executive Director of Decolonizing the Music Room (DTMR), organizer of the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival (FWAAMFest), and Program Manager for the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music’s Black Banjo & Fiddle Fellowship. Born in Atlanta and trained in Jazz Studies at Howard University (Afro Blue alum), Brandi bridges jazz, old-time, and Black American roots music on banjo, piano, guitar, and ‘ukulele—reclaiming ancestral soundscapes while building new spaces for equity and cultural memory.Across the conversation, we dig into:Decolonizing & antiracist approaches in music education (and why it’s forever work)Language, code-switching, and who gets to “name” the canonBanjo, Blackness, and rooting jazz within Black traditionsGatekeeping, tokenism, and creating space (not just “diversity optics”)Paying culture bearers fairly & building coalitionsBlack feminist thought, patriarchy, and accountability within our own communitiesBrandi’s origin story, neurodivergence, and finding grounded confidencePractical ways DTMR supports educators, artists, and organizers“Music is not only performance—it is memory, resistance, healing, and a roadmap to the future.”Guest: Brandi Waller-PaceDTMR: decolonizingthemusicroom.comFWAAMFest: https://www.fwaamfest.com/IG:   / brandipacemusic  Contact for bookings/collabs: [email protected] / PlatformJack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation FoundationThe African American Folklorist — preserving the Blues People, one voice at a time.Website:JackDappabluesradio.tv • Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jackdappabluesradi... • Patreon/YouTube Membership:   / jackdappablues  

In this episode of Jack Dappa Blues Radio, we welcome Baba Súle Greg Wilson, an American Griot, musician, author, storyteller, educator, and cultural bearer whose work moves through rhythm, Spirit, memory, and Sankofa.Born and raised in Washington, DC, Súle grew up surrounded by street musicians, family stories, global visitors, neighborhood wisdom, and ancestral conversations around the kitchen table. From learning rhythm bones from his father to helping catalyze the Carolina Chocolate Drops and co-directing the historic Black Banjo Gathering, his journey speaks to the deep roots of African and African American musical traditions.Together, we explore Sankofa, rhythm bones, the Black banjo, African spirituality, movement, storytelling, and the body as an archive of memory and healing. This conversation invites listeners to hear rhythm not only as music, but as ancestral wisdom, cultural survival, sacred disruption, and a path toward renewal.for more on Baba Súle Greg Wilsonhttps://sulegregwilson.com/