Jar of Goodness 1.23.22: KOPN

. . . The weekly virtual “gratitude jar.”

This week, I’m thankful for Columbia’s own KOPN radio, which saved my life and continues to make our community interesting, intelligent, and artful.

KOPN is a community-supported, owned, and operated nonprofit radio station based in Columbia, Missouri. It offers a wide variety of news, talk, and music, including syndicated and locally produced material. The best stuff is the product of local volunteer DJs (board shifters), who have a passion about whatever their program is about. I’ve talked about KOPN before. (Several times.)

The programs are incredibly eclectic.

I’ve been a devoted listener of KOPN since about 1981, when I went to festival called Spring Fling. KOPN used to host the festival for several years, centered on Broadway and Ninth streets, closing streets in the heart of downtown Columbia. There were different stages at the festival, with rock, bluegrass, and so on. There were vendors with booths lining the streets: The international MU students group, the Ba’hai people, the local health food co-op and Catalpa Tree Cafe, the anti-death-penalty group, the anti-nukes group, artists, handmade jewelry and tie-dyed clothes, and so much more. Spring Fling provided a one-day festival that displayed the overall culture of KOPN. I felt like I’d found my people. (Indeed, I had.) I went home, turned the dial of my bedroom clock radio to 89.5, and listened to women’s music for the first time: “The Moon of Artemis” was on.

Times have changed. The radio—and radio’s place in our lives—has changed. My tastes in music have changed.

These days, I especially love to listen to KOPN while I’m driving to and from Columbia. Their weekday afternoon drive-time programs are great. The miles go right by.

It seems I’m usually in Columbia on Thursdays, kind of. And I’ve really been enjoying the program “Hepcat’s Holiday,” hosted by Carol Goodnick. It’s a program that was first on the air in 1986. It features jazz, jive, swing, and blues from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Goodnick is an enthusiastic, informative, upbeat DJ.

Recently she did a show that was railroad themed. It was great! A few of the songs she featured were Judy Garland, “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe”; Leadbelly, “Midnight Special” and “Rock Island Line”; Sister Rosetta Tharpe “This Train”; Duke Ellington, “Choo Choo”; Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, “California, Here I Come”; and the Andrews Sisters, “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam.”

This is seriously good stuff, vintage music, jazz history, well-curated. “Hepcat’s Holiday” is broadcast live each Thursday from 3 to 5 p.m. Central Time. So if you’re in Central Missouri, just tune your dial to 89.5 and catch the program on your radio.

But no matter where you live, if you go to KOPN’s website, you can not only listen live, but also, in most cases, listen to recent shows, for at least up to two weeks. This means that neither geography nor time zones or scheduling conflicts can interfere with your hearing a particular radio program.

KOPN, by the way, is entering an exciting new period in its fifty-year history. Since it first went on the air in 1973, its studios have been at 915 East Broadway, in the heart of downtown Columbia, although visitors must ascend an imposing flight of stairs from street level. Well, in 2022 KOPN will be moving to a new studio space—one that’s handicapped accessible. In a building that KOPN owns. Though the thought of saying goodbye to what I considered hallowed, historic space is rather sad, this is great news for the station, the organization, the community, the institution.

I encourage you to check out KOPN’s programming. I’m sure you’ll find something you find interesting and enjoyable. Maybe you’ll be inspired to send them a few dollars, like I have, over the years.

Anyway, this is my gratitude jar for the day.

The High Lonesome Sound

One of the most delectable, opulently opossumable things about living in the Ozarks is our access to superb bluegrass music. No, they don’t play it at the malls, and you don’t hear it at Ruby Wednesdays.

But if you go poking around at localities like the Hitchin’ Post down at Hartsburg, or Cooper’s Landing near Easley, or at several of our wonderful local church suppers and town festivals, you’re gonna hear it.

Sometimes it’s a bunch of old dudes in overalls sitting there, playing all this great music while wearing the taciturn expression I’ve come to consider my stereotypical “Missouri farmer” look. Sometimes, it’s hippies! (Hooray for hippies!) Or college students who’ve discovered something truly cool while attending MU. And sometimes, the musicians just look like . . . I dunno . . . editors. (I’m just sayin’.) Or MU professors!




But it’s all around us; it’s in the air; it bathes us, just like this doggone humidity that all summer long transmits the rich spicy scents of bottomland soils, of shiny corn stalks shooting toward the sun, of raccoon grapevines dangling from hickory trees down by the river, and of cattle pushing their noses into endless grasses. Sure, you might live in a city, in your boundaries, in your head, but your city lives in the country, and ’round here, its soundtrack is a bluegrass one.

Bluegrass “fits” Missouri. It’s appropriate music during any season, whether you’re snowed in on a February night, or it’s a swelteringly hot July afternoon and you’re sucking on a wedge of icy cold watermelon. It’s the perfect background music for leaf-peeping in October and wildflower walks and morel hunting in April.




I hope you won’t think this is too hokey, but when we first moved back to Missouri, we lived in Columbia, clear on the other side of town from my parents’ house, and at that time my Grandma Renner was living with my parents. We tended to visit them a lot on Sunday evenings, and drive back home late at night. Clear across town.

And there’s this long-running show on Columbia’s community radio station, KOPN, called the High Lonesome Sound. It’s bluegrass on Sunday evenings (9 p.m. to midnight, Central time). And somehow, as we drove home on those Sunday evenings, the car radio would get tuned to KOPN, and we’d enjoy that high and lonesome sound all the way home.

Don’t get me wrong—I never knew Grandma Renner to listen to bluegrass—but there is something incredibly honest, straightforward, and intense about this music, the sweet harmonies and the compelling, prayerful quality of the lyrics, that tended to touch me deeply those evenings, during that time while Grandma was alive but no longer really “with” us.

I do know that bluegrass, like elderberry jam, is an acquired taste, but I encourage you to sample it or revisit it. I’m lucky, since I grew up in Columbia and have listened to KOPN and its diverse programming since about as long as I could twirl a radio knob.

And I can think of no better way to get acquainted with it than to tune in to KOPN on Sunday nights, when the dinner dishes are done and all that’s left is to put the weekend to bed.

B. G. Brown, the DJ for this show, is a local bluegrass performer and has been playing bluegrass on KOPN since the 1980s. She knows her stuff, and listening to her comments between songs is a great way of learning who’s who in this genre.

And for those of you who are not in radio range of the KOPN signal, you can tune in via the Internet; just go to www.kopn.org and click on “listen live.”




Now, by the time you read this, it will be too late for you to tune in to this week’s program, because I’m listening to it right now! But don’t worry, I’ll remind you later on so you don’t miss next week’s show.

By the way, they’re taking requests tonight! (When’s the last time you heard of a radio station taking requests?)

Cheers to B. G. Brown and the High Lonesome Sound!

Mark it down: Sundays at 9 pm Central; streaming live at kopn.org.

Farm and Fiddle

Those of you who know me also know that I’m a big fan of Columbia’s community radio station, KOPN. It’s local, it’s diverse, it’s real.

It’s different.

. . . It’s intelligent.

KOPN, by the way, transmits via the Web and not just over the air. So anyone in the world can hear it, if they have a fast computer and Internet connection.

Tonight, though, I’m not going to go on and on about KOPN in general, but about one program in particular: Farm and Fiddle. You can catch it Wednesday nights from 7 to 8 p.m. (Central time), or you can listen to it retroactively via podcast, if you’re into such things.

The hosts, Jenny and Margot, celebrate rural life in Missouri. They both have farms in Callaway County, and much of their conversation is about that. How to care for your beehives. When to divide your perennials. Tips on home canning. And so on. Tonight they hosted a seed exchange up at the station.

They give you the latest in farming news, with a particular emphasis on progressive, sustainable farming. If you’re interested in gardening, you could learn a lot listening to these two. Even if you just like going to the farmer’s market, they’ll let you know what’s going to be available.

In the breaks, they play fiddle music, past and present.

If you’re not a regular listener, now’s a good time to start tuning in, since it’s springtime, and farm life is starting to crank.