Since then, the show, which still emanates from the Capital Plaza Theater in Charleston, has expanded to more than 100 public radio stations and even a few commercial FM outlets. A corresponding CD series, released on Nashville’s Blue Plate Music label, now numbers 20 volumes.
“When we started, the response was kind of condescending,” Groce remembers. “It was, ‘That’s a nice idea, but you’ll have a hard time doing it, and an especially hard time doing it out of Charleston, West Virginia.’ In some ways we were naive, which was probably good.”
Groce remains a sort of lack-of-control freak, a quality that endears him to artists. “They don’t tell you what you’ve got to play; they just tell you how long things have to be,” says Texas singer-songwriter Eric Taylor, who has played the show twice.
“We give, I think, the most artistic freedom of any show on radio or television,” Groce says. “When I was a performer, I was on programs from The Tonight Show to Merv Griffin to Prairie Home Companion, and these people try to shape the shows in some way.”
Violinist and composer Mark O’Connor, whose recording career includes albums of jazz, rock, bluegrass, country and classical music, once hosted a remarkably heterogeneous Nashville Network television show called American Music Shop. “Where American Music Shop has come and gone, Mountain Stage is still on the radio,” O’Connor says. “Radio has joined most television in getting tighter with playlists and marketing strategies, but it’s nice to realize there’s a place on the dial you can tune into an old fashioned variety show. It’s interesting to see things break out like Mountain Stage, things that deny all reasonable lines of marketing avenues and targeting demos and all that, and actually be a success.”
Mountain Stage’s one concession to format has been in its intriguing series of Blue Plate Records CD releases, which started with multi-genre “Best Of” volumes, then switched to loosely focusing on such categories as blues, gospel, rock, folk, Texans, Louisiana, Celtic, Christmas, and lounge. This year saw the release of the first single-artist disc, a 13-song set by bluegrass progenitor Bill Monroe from a May 1989 Mountain Stage performance.
“We’re hoping to continue both theme volumes and single-artist releases,” said Dan Einstein, who runs Blue Plate and John Prine’s Oh Boy Records with partner Al Bunetta. “Great country, blues and folk has always been a niche business. We sew the niches together and do stuff that may not
have a big initial hit but sells perpetually.”
According to Einstein, the series’ biggest sellers move about 20,000 units — profitable if costs are kept to a minimum, but incompatible with the major labels that feed corporate radio.
“Volume Two of the Best Of series, with John Prine, R.E.M., Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Kathy Mattea, is probably our best seller,” he says. “Our best selling genre volume is our first Louisiana disc, and the Bill Monroe disc is doing very well. We’re also doing real well marketing these through the internet.”
Sales of 20,000, or even a listenership of about 200,000, will not loosen corporate radio’s strangling grip on the soft neck of musical decency, but Mountain Stage’s long-term survival is serving as an inspiration to those who would follow in its footsteps.
“Mountain Stage sets a high-water mark for programming of this kind,” says Nashville drummer and radio show host Billy Block. “It’s important to present quality music and show that artists who perform with integrity and individualism deserve to be championed.”
Whether such championing can foster the seeds of some benevolent musical revolution is a question difficult to suppress but impossible to answer.
“I mostly listen to talk radio now,” Welch says. “There are only a couple of music shows on that people who actually like music will listen to. If radio is interested in catering to music lovers, they better by god support these rare shows like Mountain Stage, because that’s all they’ve got left.”
