As Happy Chandler once said, “I never met a Kentuckian who wasn’t on his way home.” Tom Martin is native of Morehead, Kentucky and has come home after a long and illustrious career in radio broadcasting that went from Morehead to Washington DC to New York City and back to the Bluegrass. Tom has been a national news anchor, the substitute host for the legendary Paul Harvey and now is the producer and host of Eastern Standard on WEKU, the NPR affiliate that covers eastern, northern and central Kentucky. Tom and I talk about the power of radio, a and the way the news media has changed over the years. Tom is also an accomplished musician and tells the story of how his music and his life were forever altered the first time he heard R&B music on his transistor radio coming all the way from Nashville on WLAC. Tom has a beautiful, melodious radio voice and I could have listened to him tell his stories all day long.

Emily Hilliard is the folklorist at Berea College in Kentucky, and the co-owner of Spinster, a feminist record label. We talk about her lifelong passion for folk music and folkways and how it has evolved. We also discuss the power of folk music to create community bonds and bring people together in positive ways. Emily also talks about the future of folk, and her belief that it is a living, breathing thing and not just an artifact of the past to be preserved.

Dr Collis Robinson is the Dean of Labor at Berea College. He is the first in his family to go to college and earn a degree. We talk about the positive and powerful influence teachers and schools have had on his life and how the pursuit of education led him to opportunities he had never dreamed possible. We also muse on big topics like the struggles of boys in school the future of education in America.