HISTORY MIXTAPES - Kevin M. Kruse

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Kate Jewell 0:11

Welcome to the History Mix Tapes. I'm Katherine Rye Jewell, a historian of the business and politics of culture. In this podcast, I interview historians to see how music shapes their narratives and informs how they interact with the past. In this preliminary episode, I talk with Princeton historian, Kevin Kruse. I interviewed Kevin for my book on the history of college radio, Live from the Underground, which came out in December of 2023 from the university of North Carolina, Press. Because music and being a historian are intertwined with my experiences as a college DJ. I wanted to sit down with Kevin, who was also a college radio DJ, and have him help me think through how to approach this podcast. Let's jump right into that conversation and get this playlist started. So I started this podcast because I wrote this book about the history of college radio.

Kevin Kruse 1:08

A fantastic book about college radio.

Kate Jewell 1:10

Thank you. I started my academic career as a college DJ. You were one of these DJs of the classes right before me, who took a similar trajectory into the world of academia and history So I wanted to start by talking to you to think about how did college radio intertwine with your academic life?

Kevin Kruse 1:34

For me, college radio was almost an entirely separate track from my academic interest. And there are parallels, like if we really think about this, I think there's a reason so many historians. Maybe have the similar background is we do some of the same things. They're entirely different worlds, but going to put on a radio show is about you go into the archive. It's an archive of vinyl and CDs or things like that. You're going into there, you're picking out your primary sources. You're telling a narrative by putting them together. And just as we historians don't invent the past, but we order it, to make sense of it. We do the same thing with music. And so putting pieces in conversation, I would often play a. A funk or soul song from the sixties or seventies, and then play the hip hop song that sampled it back to back to show those lineages or to move from an old thirties country song into blues, into rockabilly, into kind of a modern indie rock thing to show the gentle transitions between those styles. Those are the stories we would tell. And so I think a lot of it comes from the same skill set, the same personality type. You're sitting at the board talking into a microphone, you presume people can hear you. You can't see them the same way you're sitting on a laptop, writing your work out. You hope someone's going to read it eventually. You don't know in the moment though. There's not a coincidence, in other words, that we were both college DJs and then historians. And I think there's a certain personality type.

Kate Jewell 3:13

When I was writing Live from the Underground, I was continuously struck by how connected the practice of doing radio was to my education in the liberal arts and sciences. While being a college DJ has, for many, been associated with learning a practical skill, maybe with stations, originating as practice labs for broadcasting or journalism programs, where students could get hands on experience. There's something about the culture of college radio that grew out of the 1970s. That turned it into something else, as well. Some of that experience is confined to a particular technological and media landscape of the 1980s in the 1990s. When music was confined to physical media, the airwaves, or the cable connection. For those of us who came of age in these decades. Moving from being a consumer of music, one of these music fans on the other end of this speaker. Waiting for a beloved song to come on the radio so he could tape it. Became something wholly different when we were the ones at the mic. The kind of self discovery and encountering of new sounds and voices in the radio stations library. Coincided with the explorations. We encountered in our classwork. I think it's no accident that Kevin and I came back to a generational framework in our discussion. But I think we both came to the realization that music, and the way we shaped our playlist and sought out new sounds. Was part of our development as historians as well. And how we sought out sources to craft stories and create new perspectives on the past. Here's us discussing how being a DJ and Kevin's academic life intertwined.

Kevin Kruse 5:06

Even though they were divorced, music was a huge part of my college experience. And maybe because they were divorced. Because I had an academic track that I was on and I was very serious about it. And I spent a lot of time working on that and in class and out. I never was the cool person in our station. I've always been like the nerdiest guy at the sports event and the sportiest guy at the hipster event. I'm always a little out of step. I'm fine with that. But what I liked about college radio was the sense of community it formed, and the sense that there are people out there who may not be like me, exactly, but we had a lot of shared interests And it was a way for me to explore a variety of new worlds that I'd never been exposed to before. And, pre internet or at least starting to get Pine email and the early web, music is one of the ways in which you can really learn about other cultures and other experiences in a way in which is now seems instantaneous. It was hard to dig into. So for me learning about South African politics in the age of apartheid was linked to the Indestructible Beat of Soweto compilations. But like a lot of different exposures and different cultures came through music for me. So it was an important part of, my growth as a person. But also I think my growth as a historian..

Kate Jewell 6:28

with these concepts laid out, I asked him to think about songs and moments that typified the connections he was making between his academic work and the community he was building as a DJ at WXYC.

Kevin Kruse 6:41

I thought of two that I think point in entirely different directions. The first direction is one that really digs deep into your community. It was radio station in Athens, Georgia that helped put R.E.M. on the map. College radio in the Northwest did the same with Nirvana. And after that, especially after Nirvana, all these places came looking for the next local scene to make it big. Chapel Hill at the time was on the map. And it was on the map because we had a good radio station, but more importantly, we had good local musicians, and we were really engaged. We, I was 18 years old, the station and these local musicians were really engaged in supporting and building up one another. And it wasn't some kind of cynical boosterism. There's a real excitement. Many of these people who were in local bands were DJs at their station or were friends of DJs at the station. So the song I would pick for the local end would be Superchunk. And I tried to pick what Superchunk song I would want. And it's not my favorite. But it's the one that put them on the map, it's "Slack Motherfucker."

Kate Jewell 7:47

Which you couldn't play on the radio.

Kevin Kruse 7:49

You couldn't play on the radio, exactly right! So we had to have a dub of that where we, and again, I remember we were in the studio where we recorded over it, and we had it on a cart deck and bleeped out every fucker. Or we had a version where a friend, I think, sang "Slack Mothertruckers." Like the screen did over the, again, a very, low fi. What Superchunk did was they were a local band, but they were very much an engine of other local bands. They're creating Merge Records, which Stacy Philpott, who was a manager at Merge, was a fellow DJ with me. But they built up not just that band, but other bands and the, general scene. And so there was a movement between WXYC Merge Records and the Cat's Cradle, which was the local venue where a lot of these things would play. And so they would put out a seven inch record at Merge. We would play it at the station. They perform it at Cat's Cradle It's a spinning wheel. The reason I said "Slack Motherfucker" is because it was a song about a place in Chapel Hill. It was about them quitting their job at the copy store. And I would walk by that copy store, listening to that song on whatever giant Walkman I had at the time. It's a real connection. They had a song called Breadman's, which is about Breadman's, a breakfast place. And so they spoke about Chapel Hill to Chapel Hill. And so it felt personal. It felt like something we were connected to. But also the reason I picked that song is that it's the true model of the seven inch and you can't talk about indie rock in this era without talking about the seven inch single. It is a cheap, but really important art form that got put out in this time. When Superchunk put out a what was it? I can't remember the name of the it's a compilation they did of of singles, but they had a line in there from Matt McCaughan, which I thought was beautiful, which said the seven inch single is a challenge. I'm paraphrasing here. What can you do in three minutes that is going to make someone get up off their couch when it's over, walk over and drop the needle down on the start again. That's the challenge to a band and a seven inch single. There, you couldn't go on for a long time. You didn't have a room for it. You had to tell a short snappy story. It's like the haiku, of, music, right? And that's what all these indie rock bands did really well. And a lot of this stuff is DIY. I remember one of the first things I did at XYC was we had a party after a concert where we all got together and colored the seven inch single covers for Arches of Loaf, their first single "Web in Front." Someone out there has a Kevin Kruse original crayon coloring of this right now. You could feel these things came from someplace. I never went and visited K records or SST or any of these other things. But I felt I knew the culture there through the kind of the handcrafted stuff you would see on a seven inch or the promotional materials. Like I really got a vibe and you can tell they're kindred spirits, a little different, right? Every place has its own peculiarities, but you can see these pockets of other kind of indie being done out there across the country.

Kate Jewell 10:50

But of course, it's not just our localities in college that shape our musical interests, or our relationship to storytelling. The stories we want to tell, the questions we ask, come from somewhere. From a peculiar mix of individual experiences and influences that shape, how we see the world, what draws us in, and the quests we go on in searching for new sounds that fulfill some sense of adventure. In this next segment, Kevin discusses the second aspect of how being a DJ and his evolution as a historian and academic work together. And here, I think anyone who has gone on a deep dive, be it crate digging or searching for an archival source will see how this experience of being a DJ connects to the many kinds of rabbit holes we find ourselves exploring.

Kevin Kruse 11:47

My family comes from Kansas. I grew up in Nashville fairly sheltered, middle class white guy with no kind of experiences with the broader world until college radio. And suddenly this is when World Music was the term at the time, but there was a real look beyond American or Anglo American music. And one of my favorite bands in this era was Stereolab. I barely speak French. So the lyrics of a Stereolab song wash over me. That's not what I'm there for. The music is amazing. The single I would pick would be, and this, I think goes to the culture of the time, a very particular version of a very particular song. The song is "French Disko." The version though, is the one spelled with a K, that was a release in 1993 on a single for their European tour. They toured with Pavement that summer, I think, and they made like a thousand of these. Again, pre-internet, pre digital media. These things were hard to find. That's what a lot of the early, or at least when I was involved in college radio was about, was who could dig up the most obscure, insane things. And there were some people who did this just to find atonal stuff. It was just alienating to be alienating. But a lot of us were like, what is the coolest thing we can find? What's the rarest thing we can find? I am embarrassed to admit how many hours of my life I have spent in used record stores. Every visit would be two to three hours because I would look through everything they had. And a lot of it was a wish list in my mind of things I'd seen once, heard once, trying to find the physical copy. And then the radio show was sharing it. There was an excitement about these rarities I found but to get these out, or showing hey, this thing that might sound familiar has the same kind of tonal structure as a, I don't know, a rockabilly song or an old country song or whatever, or, play Stereolab with Django Reinhardt, something that has a similar vibe. I think you've got to dive deep. You've also got to go broad. That's the beauty. And what radio does is it shortens the connection between people. It's not just about broadcasting what's local out to abroad. And we certainly did that, but bringing what's abroad into your local audience. And that I think is, really, it works both ways. And that's the real, even though it seems like it's a broadcast and you're sending it out, you're really in communication.

Kate Jewell 14:22

I told Kevin my favorite story from when I was a college DJ. My friend Elizabeth is the consummate crate digger. But she doesn't scour through record stores or thrift stores for music to sample, like a hip hop head might. No. Elizabeth makes a beeline for the "Eclectica" section in search. Of the weird yet catchy tunes hidden in the stacks. During one trip to Southern thrift in Nashville. She found a record of songs for children that taught them how to play bean bag games. On it was quite a catchy little song titled "Who's Got the Beanbag. We played it a few times usually to make the most awkward transition possible for the goth show that followed our show on WRVU. But then one night. We got a request. The kitchen staff at Tin Angel, an upscale restaurant in Nashville, called and, you guessed it, requested. "Who's Got the Beanbag." After reminiscing about our college radio glory days. I asked Kevin to take us forward and think about how music and his career intertwined, or maybe diverged as time went on. In the segment, it became clear how much the medium and context of musical consumption matters. For both me and Kevin. We are people who cannot write while listening to music with lyrics, a Greek tragedy for both of our processes of musical discovery. We get a little wistful in the segment, but I think it points to an important theme. One that will be a recurring framework in this podcast.

Kevin Kruse 16:13

What I would say is that a lot of my adult life has been chasing the dragon of those years as a college DJ. I fell ass backwards into a world of almost unlimited music. And I mean that in every sense, a place that again, pre internet had one of the most amazing libraries of music, anything I could possibly want was there. I could make copies of it. I could record tapes, listen to it on my own time. I could share it out with other people. Amazing, right? And every year of my life since then has seen that decay in some level. right? I would listen to college radio when I was at Cornell and upstate New York, still getting exposed to new things, not having the access at my fingertips, still spending every waking hour possible in used record stores. When I started at Princeton, my wife lived then, girlfriend, lived in the Village. I would go up, I would spend two hours at Other Music, a whole afternoon on Bleeker Street just digging through things, trying to make up for that. The more I worked though, the less time I had either to listen to the radio or to dig into record stores. Even though Princeton's got the Record Exchange here. I used to spend a lot of time there. Less and less as time went on and now I'm 52 and I'm, Shazamming songs I hear on, TV ads and I am disgusted at what I've become. So there's been a steady decay. But despite the lack of, a serious input, music's still: vitally important to me. And so I realized, I need this. I dropped off a huge part of my personality without realizing it. I think it was the chaos of the COVID year and everything where everything was in flux. I've corrected that. But but still not back to what I had been in terms of listening to music nonstop. I can't listen to music when I write. I can't have someone else's words in my ear while I'm trying to think of my own. I can do it when I edit. Sometimes. But it just became less and I realized it was a huge part of me missing. And so I've done some work to correct that.

Kate Jewell 18:18

So given this musical history, I asked Kevin to select some songs that reflected his meandering through this world of musical scarcity, then musical abundance, and then scarcity again. His story arc, was starting to emerge. And so I wanted to have him put that story to music.

Kevin Kruse 18:40

I had vague memories of a song I had seen performed on the Muppet Show by Harry Belafonte. The song was "Turn the World Around." I remember this, because he performed it not with Kermit and Fozzie or whatever, but with a set of Muppets that were drawn in what probably has not dated well, but at the time struck me as a fairly sophisticated Pan African message. It blew my mind at eight or whatever. I'd heard it once. This is broadcast TV. It's out, it's gone. And so I had a song and I kept trying to find it at XYC. I remember I dug through all the Harry Belafonte. I was trying to find this song and I couldn't, because I remembered, the title wrong. I remember it as "We Come from the Mountain." And it's "Turn the World Around." And I couldn't find it. Couldn't find it in anything we had and I'd almost given up. And then finally, when the early internet came out. When people were wildly experimenting with stuff online, and I found the song. The song, I'd literally been looking for the song for 30 years. But that was one of those things that like, finally these doors opened up, even beyond what I thought had been there in the library. So I'm from Nashville. When they interviewed me at XYC, they skipped the country section of the interview, cause they're like, "Oh, this guy's from Nashville." I hated country music. When I was growing up, it was it was Garth Brooks, Schmaltz, and it just, it felt so awful. Again, as in, I think probably my late thirties, forties, got more into bluegrass and country and like old country, like Sixties country in a way in which I never did growing up in the country music capital of the world. So things like the Carter family, Will the Circle be Unbroken," songs as that feel timeless now. It took me a while to get into and again, a genre that had literally happened area where I grew up, in Nashville in the South, and just was unknown to me. And it took the world of music when I was living outside the South to finally, get into.

Kate Jewell 21:05

At this point, I had to interject again. I had an eerily similar story with country music as Kevin. In my case, my dad was from Tennessee with deep roots in Wilson county. I grew up visiting every spring and we would often go to Opryland, the country music themed amusement park with rides named things like the Wabash Cannon Ball and George Jones being piped out of the bushes. It no longer exists. It's now the site of the Opryland hotel. But growing up in New England, instead of Tennessee, I didn't wholly get that music and aesthetic My dad had Carter family albums, Flatt and Scruggs, but I never got into it in high school. It took me going to college in Nashville, myself, to develop an appreciation for that music, one that was shaped out of my learning about the complicated history of Nashville's roots as Music City USA. As I'm listening to you talk, I'm generating some lenses of this connection between the college radio DJ persona and the historian persona. So I've had this theory for a long time. Some people may know that you got rather big on this Twitter machine. When that started to happen I was, writing this book on college radio and I had this theory that since social media was built by Gen Xers who grew up listening to college radio, or existing in this kind of world of media scarcity, where we're always trying to find our group, to find the other people, the like minded who got this one obscure weird thing. So I'm sure somebody could theorize this and much better terms, but I felt that there was a particular voice that worked well on social media. And when I found out that you were a college DJ, I was like, of course, that makes perfect sense that you had the voice that worked in this machine built by people who grew up with this older way of engaging with media.

Kevin Kruse 23:08

I like the idea about the voice. I think that's true. And it's, it sounds so counterintuitive because I think all at least for my, or all college radio DJs would recoil, was the idea that they had a radio voice, because there was a kind of a professional radio that was like this. And we were very much not that. It was the half assed nature of the approach was part of the charm. We had several DJs at XYC who, if you tuned in, it sounded like they might be currently asleep. It was both about reaching out, certainly, you're not broadcasting in secret, but reaching out for the right kind of people. You were winking and nodding in a, sarcastic way, trying to find your people out there. Not trimming your sails, definitely not looking for the broadest audience possible. Knowing who you were and what you wanted to do. And hopefully someone else would get there. There are these little in cultures, that we have. And that's what I think pop culture in the modern era has really become. It has been sliced and diced to such a fine level that we try to find people who are similar minds like us. And when we connect, it's amazing. The same thing happens on social media. When somebody makes a reference that you get in a sarcastic reply, it's a rush to know that people are out there.

Kate Jewell 24:25

With those connections and bigger contextual observations established. I wanted to know how Kevin uses music to tell stories in his own work now, particularly in his teaching. For those of us who teach topics from the modern era, there are so many ways we can use music drawn from the moments we are covering. Or which even referenced the very events we are talking about. But as I want to explore in this podcast, it's not just about using music from a particular era that we are teaching about, but using music as a way to connect thematically to what we want our students to take away from the bigger picture of our classes. More on that in future episodes. But first I wanted to hear Kevin's greatest hits from the classroom.

Kevin Kruse 25:12

So I got the idea from some other teacher but starting and closing my lectures with songs from the era. I teach mid 20th century America, so it's fairly easy. The twenties and thirties, when I teach about court packing I use the Django Reinhardt song for court packing because there aren't a lot of good songs about Charles Evans Hughes and the conservative justices of the Court. But, otherwise I find stuff that is from the era and has a connection to the topic that I'm doing. And I do this for a couple of reasons. One. The students love to hear the music. It's sadly, it's their favorite part of the course, not me. But two, it sets the tone in several ways, it sets the mood, but also puts them into the mindset of that era. To hear a popular song, to hear the tinny sound of a 1920s jazz recording, to hear the bass of 70s funk, it puts them in a mindset that I think really helps the lecture. But it also can help illustrate some points. So to give you a couple of examples. When I do the Great Society, I'm in the mid-Sixties, there are tons of songs I could use that would say mid sixties. But I've chosen a song for that one that I think speaks to it at multiple levels. And it's a song the Supremes did called "Things are Changing." And the reason I chose the song is they recorded it for the Great Society. It is a promotional song. It appeared on one of their Greatest Hits is where I found it again, digging through the archives at XYC is where I first found this. It's not popular song. I think with good reason, it promotes the Office of Equal Opportunity. But I like it because it shows the way the Great Society was marketed. It emphasizes the values of the Great Society. It's all about it again, equal opportunity. The lyrics are amazing. It's all about equal opportunity. It's all about getting a fair share. And it's, a sense of now the playing field is level. 1964, we've done it America. We solved all the problems. So it speaks to both the optimism and the blind spots of the Great Society. Another one I use is when I talk about feminism. Again, lots of songs I could use here. And obvious ones, Helen Reddy, "I am Woman, hear me roar," Aretha Franklin, R E S P E C T. Lots off great feminist anthems. I I play Loretta Lynn's "The Pill." I play it because I start off the lecture by talking about sexual freedom as being a key part of political feminism. But most importantly. I want to blow up from the very start, the assumption of some students that feminism is a left wing, northeastern liberal, whatever cause. To say, "no, here's a country music star singing about the importance of sexual autonomy through birth control." This is a popular song. This is not some subversive thing, and to show how their preconceptions about this topic are completely wrong. Again, the whole lecture isn't about the pill, the start of the lecture is, but what I want to do for that song is to disrupt those assumptions. If I just go start talking about feminism, there's a certain set of audience, mostly male, certain set of audience out there who is going to have certain preconceptions and nothing I say is going to blow that up. Loretta Lynn can kick those doors down for me. So it's not just a catchy way to start it, but a way to grab their attention and turn it in a way that I think really makes a difference.

Kate Jewell 29:23

This is one of the things that I keep thinking about with this idea of combining history with mixtapes is the easy thing is to take a song and say, here's how it reflects the context. Here's a primary source that captures this moment and do a straightforward read. But I think it speaks to some of these larger misconceptions that people have about what historians do. And that it's not that we're going here's what happened and this song documents it. It's that we're constantly reengaging with the past through the remixing of these sources.

Kevin Kruse 29:59

Yeah.

Kate Jewell 29:59

So every historian's mixtape that they make for the Great Society is going to be different. We all tell that story differently. We might even

Kevin Kruse 30:09

Yeah,

Kate Jewell 30:09

hit the same themes, but the way that we put a mixtape together about them, about an event, is, always going to be different.

Kevin Kruse 30:17

And each choice will be different and each one will, I think, dictate what the next choice is, just as the way a good mix tape, at least in my experience, is never planned out ahead of time. I think a really good mixtape is one where you are listening to it as you're making Each mixtape, even if I make that mixtape myself, I may remake it in different ways. In fact, I've got certain songs I use every time when I teach the course, and I've got other lectures in which I change them. When I teach McCarthyism, I don't use, a Pete Seeger folk. I do old country. I do Sons of the Pioneers, "Old Man Adams." I do the Louvin Brothers, Great Atomic Power." I use Hank Williams, "No, Joe." I think it blows their minds to hear these country guys talking like hippies. Again, every time I might pick something different. It's not that there's one version of history, even as I would tell it. So if you were going to make a mixtape for your current research, what captures the themes of what you're writing about right now? My current project is about the civil rights division under Kennedy and Johnson. I listen to music about the era and the place that I'm writing. Luckily I'm writing about the South in the Fifties and Sixties, so it's a lot of country, really a lot of blues. It gets me into the mindset just as I do with my classes Muddy Waters is somebody I discovered from college radio listening to Vandy when I was in high school and in the late eighties was the first time I heard Muddy Waters. I remember I went out to Tower Records on West End Avenue and got a cassette of the Real Folk Blues. And again, in the days of physical media wore that tape the hell out. That's something that's been in the back of my mind for, let me do the math 30 years, still holds a power for me. Still gets me motivated. I listened to that album and the, Chess Box Set I wore that into the ground too. But that kind of stuff sits in the background for me. I can do finishing touches to hip hop. White Flight has in the acknowledgments, I've got thank yous to, the guys from OutKast and the guys from The Roots. You can't name the band. So I had to make, I think it's like I said, thank you to my friends, Antoine Patton and Amir Thompson and on Tariq Croner, and just hope the copy editor didn't know, but those were members of the band. And even if that music is never going to hit the page, it's in my mind. I feel like it's coloring what I say.

Kate Jewell 32:46

So thinking about this conversation and the kinds of conversations that I want to have with historians about music and helping people listen to the past through a new lens, what are some questions that I should be asking?

Kevin Kruse 33:00

I think a lot of the questions you've asked about the role of music in our teaching and in our writing can be combined. I would ask people, what is the best song for this and why? And I think you're gonna get a variety of answers. A song that captures the mood, a song that captures the essential problem, or songs that work in pairs. I used to teach the 2000 election. I would open with Toby Keith, "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue," and I would end it with Green Day's "American Idiot." So the right and left versions of the George W. Bush era and put them in concert and let them fight it out, to try to provide a dialogue, to think about the way in which songs relate to one another in a particular moment, maybe ask them about pairs of songs. A side and B side. Obviously cultural historians who are writing it about music, it suffuses their work. For others though, it exists on the outside as if these political actors, as if a political campaign is divorced of music. For the Jimmy Carter lecture, I used to play Jimmy Carter Says Yes. A perfect late Seventies, but also really bad song. It just, it's, and you get a sense of, oh, this is what they were trying, and this is why it failed. I think music doesn't just have to set the stage. It can be on the stage as one of our actors. Obviously in your book in college radio, you got to talk about music, but it's in other parts of our lives. You can track the Billboard charts. You can say, this was the number one song in the country. This is what teenagers were doing in 1964. You can talk about that. And I think we should.

Kate Jewell 35:06

By the way, there was some kind of internet activity that went around a while ago of what was the number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 the week you were born? And my husband was born at the end of 1977 in October. And for one week, the number one song was the disco version of the Star Wars theme Meco. nothing can beat that.

Kevin Kruse 35:33

that is perfection.

Kate Jewell 35:45

What's missing from your playlist? What's your bonus track at the end here?

Kevin Kruse 35:50

Oh, okay. Let me give you 10 minutes of silence. And then I'll come in with my, bonus. I don't know. And that's the problem. The beauty of college radio for me was always discovery. It's like the archives. I know there's good stuff in there. I don't know where I'm going to start looking. I don't know what I'm going to find. So I don't know what the bonus track is. It's the undiscovered country. Maybe I'll, listen to future episodes of this and get my bonus track.

Kate Jewell 36:14

Kevin Kruse, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Kevin Kruse 36:18

My pleasure, Kate. This is awesome. This is, going to be fun.

Kate Jewell 36:23

Thank you for listening to this first draft of the History Mixtapes. In future episodes, I'm going to put the ideas Kevin and I through back and forth into action. I'm going to talk with historians of lots of different eras, including when major labels and political campaigns we're not turning out LPs or shaping commercial radio formats. We're going to think about how music serves as our primary sources. But also as a lens to help us think differently about the past, maybe in more broadly humanistic ways. Until then, I'm Katherine Rye Jewell, and this has been the first episode, of the History Mix tapes. Stay tuned.