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Radio Projects Overview
Nuevo South
FIVE FARMS
CDS on iTunes
Youth Noise Network
Radio Projects Overview
CDS documentary radio projects explore American lives and communities
through the intimate power of sound. They emphasize storytelling and
audio verité—“the sound of life happening.”
Featuring multiple voices, real-life scenes, and in-depth fieldwork,
they tell stories that advance understanding about society and explore,
even if implicitly, questions of human dignity and justice.
More broadly, audio programs at CDS are multifaceted, reflecting a
commitment to the teaching, making, and presentation of documentary
work. Students in undergraduate
and continuing studies courses,
as well as participants in CDS
Audio Institutes, learn various skills—from sound recording
to writing and scripting to digital mixing. Students hear audio work
from many genres and explore broader issues such as documentary ethics
and producer-subject relationships. Student pieces reach audiences
through podcasts, community presentations, and radio—the program
promotes a blend of teaching and doing audio work by connecting student
work to ongoing CDS radio projects. Pieces produced at CDS summer
institutes have been played before rooms filled with people from local
neighborhoods whose stories are being told; student pieces have also
found homes on a variety of radio outlets, from WUNC and WNCU in the
Triangle region of North Carolina to NPR and This
American Life.
In addition to teaching, audio program director John Biewen produces
documentaries and features for National Public Radio, American Public
Media, and other radio and online audiences, often in collaboration
with other CDS staff, independent producers, or public radio stations.
Nuevo South
Produced by John Biewen and Tennessee Watson of CDS Radio
Edited by Catherine Winter, American RadioWorks
Siler City, North Carolina, used to be the kind of town where almost everyone, black or white, had roots going back a century or more. Characters on the Andy Griffith Show mentioned Siler City, and the actor who played Aunt Bee retired there because it reminded her of Mayberry. It was just about the last place a Spanish-speaking immigrant was likely to land. That started to change in the 1990s.
Today, thanks to jobs in the chicken industry that no one else wants, Siler City's population is about half Latino. Many longtime residents say they’re not especially troubled by the fact that many Latino workers are undocumented. What does make some uneasy is the way this new population is transforming the racial and cultural flavor of their town. John Biewen and Tennessee Watson of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University produced this portrait of a town in transition: Nuevo South.
Nuevo South featured on the Third Coast International Audio Festival Web site
Visit the related American RadioWorks Web site "Pueblo USA"
Photograph by D.L. Anderson
FIVE FARMS
Produced by John Biewen of CDS Radio in collaboration with Wesley Horner Productions and four public radio stations across the United States
Go to the FIVE FARMS page
FIVE FARMS is an ongoing, occasional series on NPR's™ All Things Considered™ and a documentary project that will result in a series of five one-hour radio programs to be distributed nationally by Public Radio International (PRI)™ in the spring of 2009. FIVE FARMS is about making connections between the food on our tables and families who produce it, told through first-person stories from New England, the South, the Midwest, the Southwest, and the West Coast.
Photograph by Elena Rue
Digging Up Thelonious Monk's Southern Roots
Produced by John Biewen of CDS Radio
Edited by Tom Cole
The jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk would have celebrated his 90th birthday on October 10, 2007. Monk died in 1982. Besides his penchant for odd hats and other eccentricities, Monk is usually remembered as a hip New Yorker. He was a pioneer of Bebop who lived most of his life on Manhattan’s West Side. But Monk was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and raised by his mother, a native of that tobacco and railroad town. Some scholars and fellow musicians say Monk’s Southern roots had an overlooked but important influence on the man and his music. Our story was produced by John Biewen of CDS Radio.
Visit All Things Considered's Web site for their broadcast of "Digging Up Thelonious Monk's Southern Roots"
Green Street, later renamed Red Row, the Rocky Mount, North Carolina road on which Thelonious Monk's family lived, from his birth in 1917 until 1922. Photo by Jonathan Williams, 1970, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
See also: The Jazz Loft Project at CDS
Racial
Cleansing in America
Produced by John Biewen of CDS in association with the Center
for Investigative Reporting
Edited by Deborah George
Once in a while, you come across an American town or county that has
long been virtually all-white, even though surrounding communities
have black populations. It may not be an accident. Between the Civil
War and the 1920s, in more than a few rural communities, white mobs
violently expelled virtually all of their black neighbors. One of
the places living with this uneasy history is Corbin, Kentucky, a
small railroad town in the Appalachian foothills.
The CDS documentary "Racial Cleansing in America" is part
of a multimedia project at the Center
for Investigative Reporting (CIR) exploring the hidden history
and lasting impact of this chapter in America's racial history. CIR
also co-produced the film "Banished," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will air later this
year on PBS, about three towns being forced to face their racist pasts;
and provided assistance to Elliot Jaspin for his book on the topic, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden
History of Racial Cleansing in America.
Visit
Weekend Edition Saturday's Web site for their broadcast of
"Racial Cleansing in America," which features an excerpt
from the book Buried in the Bitter Waters by Elliot Jaspin
CDS on iTunes
CDS iTunes site: 70+ tracks of work by CDS students, Youth Noise Network,
CDS Radio, and other CDS programs
Launch
CDS iTunes site
Married
to the Military
Married
to the Military, a production of American RadioWorks and CDS
Visit
the American RadioWorks Web site to listen to the hour-long radio
program and view photographs from Fayetteville and Fort Bragg, North
Carolina. Married to
the Military is also featured on "Weekend
Edition Sunday" (August 14, 2005), "The
Diane Rehm Show" (August 8, 2005), "All
Things Considered" (July 3, 2005), and "Weekend
America" (July 2, 2005).
Days
of Infamy
The radio special Days
of Infamy: December 7 and 9/11, a co-production of the Center
for Documentary Studies and American
RadioWorks, captures Americans' immediate responses to the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, and contrasts them with the voices
of Americans sixty years earlier as they reacted to the Japanese assault
on Pearl Harbor. This powerful hour of radio, drawing on Library of
Congress recordings and new interviews with prominent Americans who
lived through both attacks, is an illuminating look at our nation
in crisis; it reveals striking changes in American society, and the
national character, over two generations.
Read the press release for Days
of Infamy.
Days of Infamy is part of Understanding
America after 9/11, the 2002 Public Radio Collaboration, supported
by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Archival recordings are
courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
Additional support was provided by the Michael
and Laura Brader-Araje Foundation.
Looking Back: 9/11 Across America
Read more about Looking
Back: 9/11 Across America.
Also:
banner image:
Photograph by Christopher Sims
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