american routes
hosted by PLUS’s nick spitzer

Artist interviews are a regular feature of American Routes and have included such noted musicians as B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Tito Puente, Harry Belafonte, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Randy Newman, and Celia Cruz. Great artists from the region have included: Ellis, Wynton and Branford Marsalis , Harold Battiste, Nicholas Payton, Dr. John, Michael Doucet, Marc Savoy, Kermit Ruffins, the Dixie Cups, Irma Thomas, Frogman Henry, Allen Toussaint and many others. Short documentary features have also presented the voices and lives of fortune tellers, street musicians, cooks, taxi drivers, fishermen, and preachers. The ambient city life of New Orleans--the Mississippi River and boat horns, train whistles and thunderstorms, mules hooves and tap dancers, church bells and street vendors--are all a part of the soundscape painted by American Routes.

SURS students may work with American Routes to develop their skills in documentary production, oral history, and research into American cultures and communities. SURS also offers a graduate/undergraduate American Routes course on the sources, symbols and styles of American music in relation to community life as well as a related graduate seminar on vernacular culture, arts and public policy.

SURS’s support of American Routes reflects our interests in issues of cultural policy as reflected in public radio programming as well as in portraying social and cultural ideas through the arts and media.

American Routes is produced and hosted by CUPA faculty member Dr. Nick Spitzer, who may be reached at nspitzer@uno.edu The program is underwritten in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, and by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information go to www.americanroutes.org.

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