audio
-
Songs Drifting From a Shantyboat – a Playlist
Music drifts across the water on warm summer evenings, mingling with the lapping of waves and the hum of distant voices. These songs echo the slow rhythms of river life—familiar tunes carried along the current, playing from a shantyboat radio or a dockside porch.
-
BBC Outlook – Building my own ‘shanty boat’
Wes Modes has spent the last few summers sailing along the great rivers of north America, collecting stories from the people who live on their banks. Wes travels in his homemade houseboat – or shanty boat – called Dotty.
-
BBC Between The Ears – The Shanty Boat
In a rich tapestry of watery atmosphere, frustration, intimacy, fear and pleasure, we hear a slipping, sliding adventure, where the smell of pancakes, the slap of water and the smoke of cigars wafts over the waters of Americas great rivers.
-
An Hour of Frogs
An ocean of lily pads in a lake on the river host a universe of frogs. Here’s a field recording of frogs in a lily pad field on the Tennessee River near Scottsboro, Alabama at 10pm.
-
An Hour of Cicadas
Want to know what these warm summer nights sound like? Here’s a field recording I made of cicadas near the Tennessee River in South Pittsburgh, Tennessee at 10pm.
-
-
An Afternoon Thunderstorm
A summer rainstorm blows in while we are in the tin-roofed shantyboat in the St Paul Yacht Club in St Paul MN.
-
An Intense Winter Fieldwork Trip
Tomorrow I am leaving for Minnesota and Wisconsin for a week of intense interviewing. 14 interviews in 6 days. Along with river experts, artists, and community engagement people, I hope to be talking to Hmong, Vietnamese, African-American, and Prairie Island Indian folk who are connected with the river. Along with all my cold weather gear,…