On any number of subjects, pianist, accordionist, and organist Radoslav Lorković will preface his response with something along the lines of: "That's a funny story."
When asked about his appearance in the 2009 Naked Folk Calendar, for example, he said that the photo was taken at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in 100-degree heat. Lorković was playing the accordion and (of course) naked, and a man roughly 90 years old approached the group and said, "You know, I got some stories about Woody Guthrie," the musician recalled. "He looks at me completely ... unfazed, and keeps on telling this story about Woody Guthrie."
James Brown was known as the Godfather of Soul, but his other nickname was "the hardest-working man in show business." Sugar Pie DeSanto is known as the female James Brown because of the way she works a stage, even at 73.
Introduced to jazz at an early age by her mother, singer/songwriter Dee Alexander grew up with "the classics." In a recent interview, Alexander said, "I used to ask [my mother], especially when she would play Billie Holiday, 'Wow, she sounds so sad... . What's wrong with her, and why is she whining about her man?'"
Blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter Fiona Boyes hasn't always been a blues musician. In our recent interview, Boyes laughed as she remembered her early musical experiences with a different instrument: the clarinet. "It was kind of ... a nerdy instrument," she said. "Maybe if I'd been given a bit of New Orleans jazz or something, I would've stuck with that instrument."
Blues singer/songwriter Robin Rogers has been performing professionally for the better part of 30 years and remembers where it was that she first felt the excitement of a live audience: on her elementary-school stage, in the early 1960s, performing an a cappella rendition of "What Child Is This?" for the students' Christmas pageant.
