Motherlode.TV

01/10/2026

JANUARY 10, 1982 – Valerie June is born in Jackson, Tennessee.

If you took the Appalachian reclamation of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, filtered it through the cosmic poise of Erykah Badu, brushed it with Dolly Parton’s earthbound grace, and let Billie Holiday haunt the edges, you’d arrive somewhere near Valerie June.

https://motherlode.tv/music/valeriejune.html

01/10/2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ywuF-N8xXQ

Valerie June - 'Workin' Woman Blues' available to download now https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/workin-woman-blues-single/id5726281687" Vinyl single - orde...

01/09/2026

JANUARY 9, 1950 – David Johansen is born in Staten Island, New York.

David Johansen emerged from the wreckage of late-1960s New York as one of the great shape-shifters of American music—a singer who treated identity itself as performance art. As the frontman of the New York Dolls, Johansen helped detonate punk before it had a name, combining glam excess, streetwise humor, and ragged rock & roll into something both dangerous and absurd. The Dolls weren’t polished revolutionaries; they were beautiful disasters, channeling Chuck Berry, girl-group melodrama, and downtown sleaze into a sound that rewired the future of rock.

https://motherlode.tv/music/johansen.html

01/09/2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EvaRpxf2vc

The New York Dolls performed October 19, 1973 on The Midnight SpecialGet Midnight Special Merchandise at:https://themidnightspecial.myshopify.comFollow us on...

01/08/2026

JANUARY 8, 1947 – David Bowie is born in London, England.

In the fall of 2013, The Art Gallery of Ontario held an exhibit aptly named, David Bowie Is, which featured hundreds of his personal effects. Among the finds was a list of Bowie's Top 100 Must Read Books from which we've derived our own Sweet Sixteen.

https://motherlode.tv/books/sweet16.html

01/07/2026

JANUARY 7, 1948 — Thomas Mantell, a pilot in the Kentucky Air National Guard, is killed when his P-51 Mustang crashes near Franklin, Kentucky while pursuing an unidentified flying object. What began as routine flight orders quickly turned strange: civilians, police officers, and military personnel across the region reported a bright object in the sky, metallic and oversized, moving with purpose. Mantell climbed higher and higher in pursuit—without proper oxygen—until radio contact was lost and his aircraft fell from the sky.

The official explanation came fast and tidy. The object, authorities said, was likely a Skyhook weather balloon, part of a classified Navy research program. Case closed. But the story refused to settle. Witness descriptions didn’t line up neatly, the balloon explanation shifted over time, and Mantell’s death became the first widely publicized fatality connected to a UFO encounter in U.S. history. In the early Cold War atmosphere—where secrecy, experimental technology, and public anxiety collided—the Mantell incident exposed how little control the government had over the sky, or the narrative.

What lingered wasn’t just the mystery of what Mantell chased, but the pattern it revealed. A pilot followed orders. A question was asked. An answer was supplied. And doubt set in anyway. The Mantell crash marked the moment when UFOs moved from pulp curiosity into official concern, prompting military investigations and laying groundwork for what would become Project Sign, Project Grudge, and Project Blue Book. Whatever was in the sky that day, its afterimage stayed grounded—burned into the emerging American imagination, where technology, authority, and the unknown would never fully trust one another again.

01/06/2026

JANUARY 6, 1883 – Kahlil Gibran is born in Bsharri, Lebanon.

Elvis Presley wasn’t just a musical force; he was a spiritual seeker, and one of the texts that resonated most deeply with him was The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Presley owned multiple copies, annotated them with his own reflections, and gave them as meaningful gifts to people he trusted—most notably his karate instructor Ed Parker and close confidant Charlie Hodge. His underlined passages and handwritten notes reveal how Gibran’s meditations on life, love, loss, and the divine offered Presley a language for his inner life, far from the stage lights. For Elvis, The Prophet functioned less like literature and more like a personal compass.

Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, Lebanon, and arrived in the United States as a child immigrant, settling in Boston’s South End. A poet, painter, and philosopher, he wrote from the in-between space of exile—Arab and American, mystical and modern. Though many of his early works were written in Arabic, Gibran eventually turned to English, crafting a universal, aphoristic voice that spoke to spiritual longing beyond doctrine. With The Prophet (1923), he produced one of the most enduring books of the 20th century—never out of print, translated worldwide, and embraced across generations by artists, seekers, and outsiders drawn to its quiet authority.

Boston was where Gibran’s vision first took shape, largely through the influence of F. Holland Day, the artist, publisher, and central figure of the Boston Visionists. Day recognized Gibran’s talent early, mentored him, published his drawings, and introduced him to Symbolism, Romanticism, and the idea of the artist as a fully constructed life. At seventeen, Gibran’s artwork appeared on book covers; in 1904, he held his first exhibition at Day’s studio. That mentorship did more than launch a career—it legitimized hybridity itself. Through Day, Gibran learned that art could be spiritual, defiant, and self-fashioned all at once, a lesson that would echo decades later in the hands of a singer from Memphis reading The Prophet by lamplight.

01/05/2026

JANUARY 5, 1940 – FM radio is demonstrated to the FCC for the first time.

Edwin Howard Armstrong was one of the great—and largely unrecognized—architects of the modern media world. A brilliant engineer and inventor, Armstrong revolutionized radio multiple times over, first with the regenerative circuit and superheterodyne receiver, then decisively with frequency modulation (FM). His work wasn’t about novelty; it was about fidelity. Armstrong believed sound should travel clearly, truthfully, without distortion—a conviction that placed him at the center of 20th-century broadcasting even as his name slipped out of public memory.

Armstrong’s most consequential achievement, FM radio, directly challenged the dominance of AM broadcasting and the corporate power behind it—most notably RCA. FM eliminated static, resisted interference, and delivered a richness of sound that AM could not match. But FM also threatened RCA’s enormous investments and control of the radio industry. What followed was a prolonged, punishing battle: legal disputes, strategic delays, and regulatory shifts that stalled FM’s adoption for years. Armstrong ultimately won key patent rulings, but the victory came too late. Financially ruined and isolated, he became a tragic figure—an inventor who proved the future but lived to see it postponed.

One of Armstrong’s most important allies during FM’s long wilderness years was T. Mitchell Hastings, a Boston-based broadcaster and engineer who understood that FM wasn’t just better technology—it was a different cultural platform. Hastings championed high-fidelity FM broadcasting, building transmitters and experimenting with programming that treated radio as immersive, exploratory space. His early FM work in Boston helped establish the technical and philosophical groundwork that would eventually make stations like WBCN possible. When WBCN emerged as a freeform, countercultural force, it was standing on infrastructure—and an ethos—shaped by Armstrong’s vision and Hastings’ persistence. Together, they didn’t just improve radio; they quietly changed who radio was for.

https://live365.com/station/Motherlode-Radio-a00457

01/04/2026

On JANUARY 4, 1883, Max Eastman is born in Canandaigua, New York—an origin point for one of the most volatile collisions between art, politics, and the state in American history. Eastman would become editor of The Masses, a radical, artist-driven publication that mixed modernist graphics, poetry, satire, and hard-left politics into something that felt less like a magazine than a cultural bomb. The Masses didn’t just criticize power; it mocked it, aestheticized dissent, and treated politics as a form of lived experience rather than policy debate.

That posture brought the magazine straight into conflict with the U.S. government during World War I. In 1917–18, Eastman and his fellow editors were twice put on trial under the Espionage Act, accused of obstructing the draft and undermining the war effort. The Masses Trial wasn’t really about conscription—it was about whether the state could criminalize ideas, images, and tone. The jury deadlocked both times, and the government failed to secure convictions, but the damage was done: The Masses was effectively destroyed, its mailing privileges revoked, its contributors scattered. It was one of the clearest early tests of free speech in the modern media age, and it exposed how fragile those protections were when art refused to behave.

Hovering behind this moment was a different kind of power broker. Charles R. Crane, a major financier and political operator, was instrumental in helping elevate Woodrow Wilson to national prominence and ultimately the presidency. Wilson’s administration would go on to oversee the very wartime repression that ensnared Eastman and The Masses—an irony baked into the era’s contradictions. The same progressive ideals that promised moral leadership abroad enabled censorship and surveillance at home. In that tension—between radical expression and liberal power—the Masses Trial still resonates, a reminder that culture often reaches the future first, and pays the price for arriving early.

https://campprovincetown.com/max-eastman/

01/03/2026

JANUARY 3, 1793 – Lucretia Mott is born in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Lucretia Mott stands at the crossroads of American conscience—an abolitionist, traveling Quaker minister, and relentless advocate for women’s and minority rights long before those causes had names people took seriously. Born Lucretia Coffin on Nantucket, a Quaker stronghold where men went to sea and women ran the island, she grew up inside a lived philosophy of equality. The Society of Friends taught that all people carried divine light, and Mott never wavered from that belief, even when the nation did. As she famously warned, “The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”

Mott’s activism was not abstract—it was embodied. She spoke publicly against slavery at a time when women speaking at all was considered scandalous, recounting tales of slave ships and human suffering with moral clarity that unsettled polite society. In 1827, she and her husband James Mott followed Elias Hicks during the Great Separation, rejecting evangelical orthodoxy in favor of a more radical, inward faith rooted in equality and social justice. Her causes expanded naturally: abolition, women’s rights, prison and school reform, temperance, peace, and religious tolerance were not separate issues to Mott, but part of the same moral ecosystem.

The flashpoint came in 1838, when Mott helped organize a three-day anti-slavery convention at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall, dedicated to free speech. Mobs gathered. The hall was burned to the ground. Mott walked home through the chaos, unshaken. Two years later, barred from full participation at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, she recognized the deeper injustice at work. That exclusion led directly to Seneca Falls in 1848, where Mott stood beside Elizabeth Cady Stanton in drafting the Declaration of Sentiments, a radical rewriting of American democracy itself. With Lucretia Mott, the fight for abolition and the fight for women’s rights became inseparable—once stitched together, never to be undone.

THE DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS: REIMAGINED 2026:
https://motherlode.tv/politics/seneca.html

01/02/2026

JANUARY 2, 1900 – John Hay announces the Open Door Policy to promote trade with China.

When John Hay announced the Open Door Policy on January 2, 1900, it was presented as a diplomatic principle meant to preserve free trade and territorial integrity in China amid intensifying imperial competition. In practice, it asserted the United States’ right to commercial access without the burden of formal colonization—a new model of influence based on markets rather than flags.

Charles R. Crane stood close to this moment, both ideologically and operationally. Crane had extensive financial, cultural, and political interests in China and Russia, funding research, education, and unofficial diplomatic channels that shaped American understanding of Asia. He believed deeply that commerce, culture, and moral authority could be leveraged together to guide nations without overt force.

The Open Door Policy reflected that worldview. It marked a shift in American power—from territorial ambition to economic and ideological reach—and figures like Crane helped engineer the intellectual framework behind it. Long before formal treaties or military presence, influence was already being negotiated through access, capital, and narrative.

https://motherlode.tv/mucholapka/

01/02/2026

JANUARY 1, 1993 - Czechoslovakia is divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in The Velvet Divorce.

Charles R. Crane was one of the most influential behind-the-scenes architects of Czechoslovakia. A wealthy American industrialist and informal diplomat, Crane used his money, access, and obsessive interest in Slavic culture to champion Czech and Slovak independence during World War I. He became a close ally and financial backer of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, helping legitimize the idea of a sovereign Czechoslovak state in Washington at the exact moment when American recognition mattered most.

Crane’s influence extended far beyond polite advocacy. He funded research, propaganda, travel, and political networking that reframed the region not as a fragment of collapsing empires but as a viable modern nation. Through his role on the King-Crane Commission and his proximity to U.S. power brokers (including Wilson-era policymakers), Crane helped steer American moral authority toward Slavic self-determination. Czechoslovakia’s birth in 1918 was not accidental—it was engineered through persuasion, capital, and narrative.

Which makes the Velvet Divorce of 1993 even more striking. A nation midwifed through Crane’s transatlantic idealism ended not with catastrophe, but with consensus. The same state that was carefully assembled through diplomacy was quietly unassembled through agreement. Creation without conquest. Dissolution without blood. Crane isn’t just part of the origin story—he’s embedded in the long arc that makes Czechoslovakia’s beginning and its ending so unusually humane.