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Finding America, Repeatedly, on a Bus: Singer-Songwriter Doug Levitt Offers "The Greyhound Diaries"

Aired on Wednesday, December 9th.

On this edition of ST, we get to know Doug Levitt, an American singer-songwriter...and former London-based foreign correspondent (who once upon a time reported for, among others, ABC and NBC). About a decade ago -- or about 100,000 miles ago -- Levitt started riding Greyhound buses all across this nation in order to gather stories, songs, pictures, and memories of those who travel by bus in America. This is basically a country, after all, where people don't ride the bus unless they have to -- and so Levitt's myriad encounters have brought him in contact with people of all sorts who are, in one way or another, struggling to get by. As Levitt tells us on today's show -- after performing a song at the outset of our discussion -- his ongoing "Greyhound Diaries" project is also the basis for a pair of EP recordings as well as a web series. It's an endeavor that Levitt says he originally modeled on the WPA initiatives of the 1930s, which were federally sponsored efforts to render a fuller portrait of America at a crisis point in history. Please note that Levitt will be offering a free-to-the-public concert tomorrow night, Thursday the 10th, at the Woody Guthrie Center in the Brady Arts District in downtown Tulsa. For more information on that show, call 918-574-2710.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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