What’s your name and your DJ name?
My name and my DJ name are very similar and that would be Jerry Faires.
What’s the name of your show, and when is it on?
The Jerry Faires Show, alternate Thursdays from 7-9 pm Mountain Time. (The other Thursdays are DJ Serafina).
Please describe your show. What’s its format?
I play some recordings and mostly, not entirely, songwriter-oriented, almost all CDs. I play live every show, live guitar and voice. Hosted some wonderful live shows and I plan to do more of that whenever the opportunity arises.
What drew you to participate in KMRD?
I was on radio on Cape Cod 1990-91 on a community station. I enjoyed it very much and I had immense appreciation and admiration for Stella and Will and everyone else who helped start this. Because she took this on, our Mother Superior, at a shockingly young age and accomplished getting a radio station for this little town and it’s made a remarkable difference.
What’s the appeal of doing a radio show? How does it fit into the rest of your life (job, creative passion, family)?
Well, as a musician and songwriter and performing since I was three years old, it fits in perfectly with my life. And the singer-songwriters I admire give me their CDs that I play on the air. All my life I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to know the whole world, the wonderful work of all these people that I admire. It’s just a natural extension and enhancement of my own music, and I get to throw new songs out there (on the air) and dig out others.
What difference has being a DJ made in your life?
It’s allowed me to bring on live with me my highly illustrious friends as they pass through the area and expose their music. Other than that, it’s part of what I do – it keeps me out of trouble I guess, every other Thursday at least.
It’s a natural part of half of my life, and the other half of my life in terms of doing is I’m a silversmith and whether or not they take advantage of it, my friends who live far, far away, can tune in and listen to my voice and I hope they do.
What are your hopes for the station? What are your hopes for your show?
What I hope my show does is expose people who’ve tuned in, to some very wonderful musicians playing some very wonderful music.
And also I would hope that many of those young bands and musicians who wander through Madrid from Austin and other places, through the exposure of what I play, might come to some comprehension of the shoulders upon which they stand. Because they don’t know or don’t have an awareness of the greatly enormous talents of especially singer-songwriter and acoustic musicians of the last two generations. They rather feel that they invented it themselves, and it’s important to know who went before and who’s work they built on.
In my early life as a folk singer in the early ’60s we knew who we followed, we knew who plowed the field for us, to be able to do what we were doing. And for me, that probably started long before that with my teacher and mentor, Charles Nelson in high school, learning to appreciate singing Bach and knowing and being around a black farmer named Mance Lipscomb and being taught and told by him to take your music from wherever you find it and make it your own.
But he also made me understand that I needed to appreciate where it came from and be knowledgeable about it. My father played, and Jimmy Rogers was his Bob Dylan. We are all a part of a long legacy of tradition and it deserves our attention, and I hope my show engenders that, so there!
My hopes for the station are that it grows and that the community grows with it in support and that we can move closer, even closer, to doing live presentations, the bigger stuff in our “un-common” room so that ultimately we can be a desired KMRD musical destination for passing players.
Tune on in!