Echoes From The Ash Grove

Episode 7: Touring Revolutionary Nicaragua Through Folk Songs

In the early 1980s, Nicaragua was rebuilding itself after revolution and the soundtrack of that transformation was carried not just in speeches, but in song. In this episode of Echoes from the Ash Grove, we revisit a broadcast that takes listeners on a journey through post-Somozan Nicaragua using folk music as a guide. From literacy brigades to cooperative farms, from community choirs to traveling troubadours, the program explores how traditional melodies were reshaped to reflect a new political and cultural identity. These weren’t abstract anthems. They were songs about land, labor, memory, and belonging — performed in plazas, schools, and village gatherings. Through them, we hear how a nation in transition tried to narrate itself. This episode asks: what does a revolution sound like when the guns fall quiet? And how do folk traditions adapt when history suddenly accelerates? Echoes from the Ash Grove continues its exploration of the place where music, politics, and cultural memory meet — one broadcast at a time.

Episode 6: Warrior Priests and the Guerrilla Jesus

In the 1970s and 80s, across Central America, church basements became organizing hubs, hymns became protest songs, and the Gospel was read through the lens of poverty and power. In this episode of Echoes from the Ash Grove, we revisit a powerful broadcast exploring Liberation Theology — the movement that asked what Christianity demands in the face of dictatorship, inequality, and war. Through the firsthand perspective of Sister Pat Kromer and the music emerging from Nicaragua and El Salvador, we trace how faith communities blended scripture, song, and social action. From community choirs to revolutionary mass settings, from Archbishop Óscar Romero’s sermons to grassroots literacy campaigns, this is the story of how theology moved from the pulpit to the street — and how music carried belief across borders. When does a hymn become a rallying cry? When does faith demand resistance? Echoes from the Ash Grove continues its exploration of the place where music, politics, and culture collided and where even a church song could become an act of courage.

Episode 5: Venice Beach ’81: Renters, Radicals & Stolen Telephone Poles

In 1981, Venice Beach wasn’t a brand — it was a battleground. In this episode, we dive into a remarkable broadcast from KPFK’s Up From the Ash Grove, capturing Venice, Los Angeles in the middle of a fight over who gets to live by the sea. Long before tech money and million-dollar bungalows, renters, artists, and local organizers were battling City Hall, building their own park from scavenged materials — including a few “acquired” telephone poles — and getting arrested to defend their community. Featuring Ed Pearl, activist Carol Berman, and musician Uncle Bill Crawford, this sonic time capsule reveals a Venice that was gritty, defiant, and fiercely protective of its freedom — a place once described as “the backyard nobody wanted.” From bulldozers and jailhouse art spaces to blues songs and civil disobedience, this is the story of Venice Beach before gentrification — told by the people who lived it.

Episode 4: The Battleship That Killed The Steel Mill

In late 1983, inside a packed Los Angeles auditorium, a staged draft raid opened a rally called “The War at Home.” What followed was not just speeches — it was an attempt to connect battleships to steel mills, tomato fields to foreign policy, poetry to ballot initiatives. In this episode, we dive into a remarkable recording from that night. A steelworker breaks down the economics of military spending. A former White House insider reframes patriotism as a moral choice. An urban planner imagines Los Angeles as an “army camp” dependent on global supply lines. Poets confront the human cost of war — at the border, in Central America, and in the barrio. This wasn’t abstract ideology. It was a cultural space wrestling with the Cold War in real time — through theater, argument, and art. From the Ash Grove archive, this is a story about what happens when music venues become civic battlegrounds — and what it means to ask where the money really goes.

Episode 3: Songs Under Siege in Beirut

In the summer of 1982, as Beirut was under bombardment, Ed Pearl broadcast a remarkable episode of Up From the Ash Grove devoted to Palestinian music and poetry. This wasn’t a news bulletin. It was something quieter — and, in its own way, more powerful. Through wedding field recordings, work songs, fisherman ballads from Jaffa, and the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish set to music, the program explored how a people carry their homeland in sound. From the stomp of the dabke to the mournful cry of the rebab, from vineyard harvest songs to anthems of return, this episode traces how everyday music becomes memory, identity, and endurance under siege. Echoes from the Ash Grove revisits that broadcast and asks: when land is contested and borders shift, can song become a place you still belong?