Alive and Picking started in the mid-1970s as a two-hour Saturday morning folk and bluegrass radio show which I produced and hosted on KCSN-FM, located on campus at California State University at Northridge. On that station and in that format it existed for approximately three or four years (all dates approximate!) I was simultaneously running a traditional music record store in Pasadena (which later moved to Santa Monica), co-hosting a weekly folk, bluegrass and country show called Sweethearts of the Radio on KCSN with my close friend Linda Mack, hosting a two-hour weekly blues radio show, Preaching the Blues, on KPFK, working nights and weekends as a freelance music writer, and single parenting my two youngest children. Something had to go, and it was the KCSN folk show. In the early 1980s I revived it, still called Alive and Picking, as a one-hour program on KPFK on Thursday mornings from 6-7 a.m. as part of the station's now-defunct Sunrise Concert series. Did that for a couple of years, and kept doing the blues show too.
Eventually, however, my increasing work as a reissue producer and annotator, coupled with my need to make a living, forced me to retire from my unpaid work on the airwaves for a while. (A while morphed into about twenty years.) During this time I saw my children grow, leave home, marry and begin their own lives; wrote several essays, later published in books (click here to see bibliography); and produced and annotated over 200 LPs and CDs of various kinds of folk, roots and blues music (click here to see discography, or for more entries go to www.allmusic.com and type Mary Katherine Aldin into the box where it says "enter name of artist"). Oh yes, and I worked a full time day job too. In approximately 1985 I handed off the blues show to my close friend Ed Archer, who continues to host it to this day (hear him Thursday nights from 8-10 p.m. on KPFK, 90.7 FM in Southern California and on the net at www.kpfk.org), and I "kept my hand in" on public radio by occasionally guest hosting the show for Ed when he was on vacation or unwell.
Fast forward a couple of decades:
In October of 2000 I was called by Betto Arcos, then the music director at KPFK, who knew me from my occasional work as Ed's substitute host. He invited me to revive Alive and Picking yet again, as a one-night fill-in show for Roz and Howard Larman's show Folkscene, which was off the air temporarily due to a dispute with station management. I did that, with the understanding that it was only on a temporary basis, on Sunday, October 22, 2000, and the show continued, still only on a temporary basis, through April of 2002, when the Larmans and Folkscene finally returned. The Calendar page, originally created for the show, will continue to be maintained as an independent entity.
Claire Chandler set up this web page for the show in May 2001, and maintained it for me for several months; I think she has finally been able to hammer instructions into my head that enable me to update it myself. My grateful thanks to her for all her help.
Mary Katherine
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