A busy year is coming to an end, so we’re going to ease our way out of 2024 with a short episode that features a note of thanks and bonus interview content. This year, I asked eight interviewees to pick a song that represents something about their experiences with the Mississippi River. I’ve spliced together their picks for this episode, and they cover a lot of territory, from classic river songs to a couple of unexpected choices. While I can’t include the songs in this podcast because of the copyright police, head to Spotify and listen to the songs on the “MVT Podcast Episode 53 playlist.”. I wish you all a relaxed and meaningful end to 2024.

Show Notes

Check out the playlist for this episode at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3KaQ8r6y0oejSLQ7mAU6PM?si=6c652410bbe34139.

Two of the songs weren’t available on Spotify, but you can listen to them below.

Check out the full podcast episodes with these guests:

Support the Show

If you are enjoying the podcast, please consider showing your support by making a one-time contribution or by supporting as a regular contributor through Patreon. Every dollar you contribute makes it possible for me to continue sharing stories about America’s Greatest River.

 

Don’t want to deal with Patreon? No worries. You can show some love by buying me a coffee (which I drink a lot of!). Just click on the link below.

Transcript

Mon, Nov 25, 2024 1:18PM • 17:24

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Mississippi River, podcast episodes, river history, natural history, river songs, guest interviews, book release, Patreon support, river music, song recommendations, river experiences, river pilots, river historians, river refuges, river musicians

SPEAKERS

Dean Klinkenberg, Hallie Schultz, Lee Hendrix, John Anfinson, Anne Sherve-Ose, Trapper Haskins, Sabrina Chandler, Boyce Upholt, Steven Marking

Dean Klinkenberg 00:27

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg, and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going. Welcome to Episode 53 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. This is the final episode of 2024. I’ll be back in January with some new episodes, but it’s time to take a break for the holidays. Plenty of stuff going on, and you probably have plenty to do yourselves. So this has been a busy year, and I just want to start by thanking all y’all for supporting the podcast. Over the past two and a half years, these 52 previous episodes, it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed having the opportunity to talk to such a wide range of folks, and this year has been no different. Just just looking back on what I released this year, we covered topics including river history, natural history, we talked with some authors. We talked with a couple of paddlers and even an artist. If you go back and check out the episodes from 2024 you’ll find that wide range of interviews. So we talked to folks like Lee Hendricks, a long time river pilot who released a memoir early in the year. We helped celebrate the 100th anniversary, the centennial of the Upper Mississippi Refuge, two episodes on that. We talked with Trapper Haskins, his book about his experience rowing a homemade boat down the Mississippi. I talked with my brother about urban development, and we covered some territory on why so many river towns are struggling. That’s a really interesting episode to go back and listen to if you haven’t if you’re interested in the fate of our communities along the river. Talked with Boyce Upholt. Go back and listen to that episode as he talks about his new book, The Great River, that was released this summer. Had a fun couple of episodes on the natural history side, talking about dragonflies and damselflies, and also an episode on snakes and Snake Road in Illinois. A history episode, we looked at a man that we should all probably be a lot more familiar with, General Logan, who had a big effect on not just Illinois history, but on US history. And we even took a little side step away from the Mississippi and we talked with Aaron Brown about Minnesota’s Iron Range and life in that area. Like I said, a lot of different topics. We covered quite a lot of territory this year. So I’m thankful for all of you for continuing to listen. And of course, this year was also the year that I released my book, “Wild Mississippi,” a natural history of the river. I spent a lot of the summer traveling around, talking about that book and explaining why we should be valuing the natural world of the Mississippi far more than we do. If you’re interested in having me come to your community, reach out to me, [email protected], and maybe we can work something out, and we can, we can tell folks about how amazing the world of the Mississippi River is. Well, we’re going to have a brief episode to finish out 2024. I want to just I’ve been saving up a few of these clips this year. When I interviewed guests for many of them, I asked them to name a song, at least one song that really captured their experience or their feelings about the Mississippi River, and I’ve been saving those for this last episode. So we’re going to hear from seven different people today, I believe about they’re going to tell us the songs that they really enjoy that really say something to them about the Mississippi. I have a whole section on my website about music about the Mississippi River. I have interviews with a handful of musicians. I’ve got a big list of 1000 plus songs that are directly or indirectly about the Mississippi. If you want to go there and find maybe a new song of yours. If you’re curious about what other songs are part of this grand list, go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com and then just select the River Music tab, and that’ll take you to all of that content. As always, thanks to those of you who’ve shown me some love through Patreon. It makes me smile, makes me happy, and it provides direct feedback to me that there are people out there who do value this podcast. You help keep it going, and for as little as $1 a month, you can join the Patreon community and get early access to all these episodes. You want to know how to do that, go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg,and you’ll find out how to sign up there. If Patreon is not your thing. Well, you can just buy me a coffee. So head to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast. And you’ll see a tab or a button, whatever term you want to use. You’ll find a button, let’s say that, where you can make a contribution to my caffeine habit. All of that is very much appreciated. Show notes, all the previous episodes for this year and previous years. Just same link, MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast, you’ll find it all there. So now let’s get on to this episode. Well, as I mentioned at the top of this episode today, we’re just going to take a quick little detour to the world of river music during interviews with guests this year, I asked many of them to name a song or two that really meant something to them or said that spoke to how they felt about the river. So we have, I think eight people actually, I might have said seven up front, but we have eight people that answered the question. We have Lee Hendricks, the river pilot, John Anfinson, the river historian, and Sherve-Ose, who paddled the Mississippi River one week at a time, eventually completing a source to sea paddle over the course of many years. Author Boyce Upholt. Sabrina Chandler, who is the Refuge Manager for the Upper Mississippi Refuge, and Hallie Schultz, the Visitor Services Manager for the Upper Miss Refuge. We have musician / performer all around renaissance man, Steven Marking, offering, giving us his thoughts as well. And then we’ll finish with author /carpenter / musician. Everybody has lots of slashes in their talents this year. Trapper Haskins has a few words to say about his favorite song about the river. I wish I could play you clips from each of these songs. Unfortunately, the music copyright police would be knocking at my door and hauling me off to some dark prison somewhere never to be heard from again. So I won’t be able to play you any clips of the songs, but I have put together a playlist on Spotify. If you go to Spotify and just search my name, Dean Klinkenberg, you’ll see a couple of public lists. One of them is just a much longer list of hundreds of songs about the Mississippi. The other will be up just songs mentioned in this particular episode. So it’ll be, I don’t know, I’ll label it something like Episode 53 Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast, or maybe something completely different, just to confuse everybody. All right. Well, let’s get on with it, and let’s hear from these eight folks about the songs that speak to them, that have something to say about the Mississippi. If you were going to pick a song that captured your experiences with the river, you know, what would that song be?

Lee Hendrix 08:26

So there’s alt country singer by the name of Cody Jinks. He He wrote a song called the Lost Highway, which, of course, was a Hank Williams song, but it wasn’t a cover of Hank Williams, it was different, same title and oh, the lyrics of that just are so appropriate to anybody who’s spent a lot of time out on the river. He’ll make you laugh and it’ll make you cry. It’ll make you live, make you live and make you die. It’s a road that goes it’s a road that goes on, but it turns around, comes back. You know, it’s like the whole theory, you know, the whole thing being like the river is a linear but it doesn’t, you don’t think of it in a linear way. You think of it, and that’s one of the things I should have brought up in when you asked me that question before. So don’t always think of the river linearly, because there’s so many past things that have happened on one particular stretch of river that I can turn it around and go back up the river in my mind, and it’s all these things just occurring, like a vortex of time and space, if that makes any sense.

John Anfinson 09:50

You mean of the 1000 songs you’ve you’ve identified. You know, I really thought hard about that question, and I realized, you know, what it comes down to is my mood? What kind of mood am I in? You know, and that’s the song of the river I will go to. I can listen to Old Man River, you know, sung by the great bass singers if I’m in that mood. I can listen to, you know, the House of the Rising Sun, or, you know, the City of New Orleans train song, or Charlie McGuire in one of his ballads, there’s, there’s so much I just, it depends on what mood I’m in. You know that that’s that trick question, like, like, people ask you, what’s your favorite National Park? As a national park service person, so that’s my that’s my answer.

Anne Sherve-Ose 10:40

When we finished the Mississippi, we did a lot of public speaking, and we would always sing this song as part of our program. It’s called Mighty Big River, and it’s by Jim Post, and it it talks about how the Mississippi River is, is the heartbeat of America. And every everything revolves around the Mississippi. It goes like this. “I know that the rhythm of the river. I know. Like an Indian drum, and I know, that the rhythm of the river, it’s a river of life. It’s a river of man. The Mississippi River is the heartbeat of the land.” And then it talks about spring, summer, winter and fall on the Mississippi, look it up, Mighty Big River.

Boyce Upholt 11:40

So it’s a the song that I always think of the most is Live Free by Son Volt who I know is I forget that, I think they’re from somewhere in Illinois, so they’re a Mississippi River Band, but, but Live Free just has several lines in it that that always strike me. I believe it’s about sort of like a road trip down south into Louisiana. And there’s a line about the Delta mud will be there, which just always meant a lot to me, living in two different deltas in the Mississippi Delta and the Mississippi River Delta here in Louisiana. And then there’s also the line, “the rhythm of the river will remain”, which feels like a theme that has come through my Mississippi River work a lot. I’m just like, no matter what we do, this river is persisting on its own way.

Sabrina Chandler 12:21

This was a tough one for me,. Dean, so I am a music junkie, especially a live music junkie, so, so I really struggled. But you know, I might have to just cheat and have to because I love the Doobie Brothers. And you know, everybody knows the song Blackwater, and you know, it talks about floating on a raft on the Mississippi. And you know, “she’s calling my name, catfish are jumping,” you know, I’m not going to sing it to you, but that was the first one I saw your question there. But then, being from Mississippi and growing up on the Lower Mississippi, and then coming here and being here for the last 10 years, people have always called me the Mississippi Queen, and so I might have to use that one too. But yeah, so that was actually a little tough question for me, but it was, it was fun to think about that. So, yeah, I appreciate that.

Hallie Schultz 13:25

This answer is solely because it’s the first it is the first song that pops into my head anytime I think about the river. And I like to try to, like annoyingly, sing it to my students. But of course, Old Man River, I mean, that is it. I think when I first started working here, I was like, loudly singing it outside. So, yeah, classic song. I mean, it’s, it’s a good one.

Steven Marking 13:53

I do, and a lot of people are saying, Oh, he’s going to say Old Man River, because that’s his signature song. But it’s not When the Levee Breaks, really, was written in response to the 1927 flood. And I know everybody’s thinking, Oh, Led Zeppelin. Well, Led Zeppelin stole that song from Memphis Minnie. It’s a great old straight up Delta Blues song, and the guitar is fantastic, and Memphis Minnie is playing the guitar, and her husband, Kansas, Joe is is singing. And it’s it’s my favorite river song right now, because it really points out what the cost of those levees are. It’s those levees cost a lot more than money. They cost the ecology. They cost human cost. There’s the levees are not necessarily a friend to the river, and that song epitomizes it. “If it keeps on raining, the levee is going to break.” So When the Levee Breaks by Memphis Minnie. Look it up.

Trapper Haskins 15:12

I want to say anything by John Hartford, but I’m going to narrow it down to one song. But John Hartford, for those that don’t know, I’m sure anybody listening to a Mississippi River podcast is a John Hartford fan, but Steamboat Whistle Blows, Old Time River Man, Skippin in the Mississippi Dew. All those are very special songs to me. But if I had to pick one, it would be for a specific reason. The Julia Belle Swain by John Hartford has a line in it, which is where the title of my book came from. And there’s a line in the book where he says, “Nothing like a crooked old river. Straighten my head right out.”

Dean Klinkenberg 15:47

Well, I hope you found that interesting. Hope you’ll be going out and looking up some of those songs. Let me just tell you real quickly again, who we just heard from in order – Lee Hendricks, John Anfinson, Anne-Sherve Ose, Boyce Upholt, SabrinaChandler, Hallie Schultz, Steven Marking and Trapper Haskins. And with that, I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends or family or whoever you choose to spend the time with. And here’s to an uneventful and meaningful close to 2024. I’ll see you back here in January of 2025. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free, but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon to help keep the program going, just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that’s set in places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg, Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time.