So much to love about Ash Devine - her songs, her singing, her humanitarian clowning, her Magic Penny instrument gifting, her Earth connection, her social activism, & much more. Combining indie-folk and Appalachian music influences with her Theater & Community Arts for Social Change studies, Ash is a captivating performer, breathing spirit & joy through her vocals and a dance of the soul through her instruments.

Johnsmith includes exactly the right mix of heart, wonder, & whimsy in the songs he writes, combined with a flawless voice and impeccable guitar. He has produced 8 solo CDs, was a Kerrville New Folk winner, & has decades experience performing all across the USA.

Each year there's a contest sponsored by the Renaissance Artists and Writers Association called Songs for Social Change, and today we have here the winner of last year's contest. Mary Lou Fulton rated number one out of many hundreds of submissions with her song Not Going Back. What makes it all the more remarkable is that she did it with the very first song she ever released! But it was but first in a healthy line of wonderful music, as she transitioned from telling stories through journalism and newspaper, to singing stories for the world. Mary Lou Fulton joins us from Los Angeles.

A tribute to John Prine, with 6 guests, some singing songs by John, others singing songs about and inspired by John, all paying tribute to a great, truly unique, country-folk singer who died this past April. Carsie Blanton, Laura Farley, and Johnsmith will be singing originals, while Sammie Purcell of Foxes and Fossils, Tom Pirozolli, and Joe Jencks will be covering John Prine songs. Great originals & great renditions, seeded by John Prine.

Peter Alsop's latest release is Camping With Dads, and it includes all the fun & profundity you expect from Peter, providing learning about all kinds of stuff, from racism to listening to violence to gorillas.

Shawn Gallaway is a minstrel of health, wholeness, hope, & love, a message and mission that opened its stride to cover more of the Earth with his anthem, I Choose Love. His music is soul-deep, a power conveyed clearly through his crystal vocals and heart-opening lyrics. Shawn is a long-time resident of Nashville emanating his Transformational Music across the country and world. He was a top-ten finalist in the 2017 Songs For Social Change contest featured by RAWA.net.

Amanda Udis-Kessler is a music-creation fountain whose recent project is QueerSacredMusic.com, 60-plus songs beginning with sacred music relative to LGBTQ concerns, but enriched by the spiritual experiences relative to the arrival of COVID-19 and the nationwide uprising against racism and other injustices. Amanda's theology is open, accepting, and rooted in a universal love, and is enriched by the training and talents of her Ph.D. in Sociology, her time in seminary, and her wide and deep lyrical and musical creativity. Raised as a secular Jew, her never-ending spiritual pilgrimage has included sojourns and enrichment with the UU, Quakers, UCC, Buddhism, Bahá'í, and much more.

A look at some of the finalists of the Songs for Social Change contest in 2019, artists with a variety of styles & themes, all about change for the better. With reggae, electronica, rock, & folk, 6 different artists share their various soulful songs, working for a better world, with first prize going to Mary Lou Fulton for Not Going Back.

Sparky Rucker was introduced to the music of the civil rights movement when his mother took him to his first march at the age of 14, but he was already steeped in the music of the era in the black Pentecostal church of his youth and the distinctive Appalachian culture of Eastern Tennessee. Sparky Rucker has woven together music, activism, history and culture for more than 5 decades, raising and inspiring spirits everywhere.

Joe Newberry has a wonderful voice, and writes tunes & lyrics to enrich that wonderful voice to the point of sublime. Writing music that tends toward old-timey, bluegrass, spirituals, torch songs, & more beyond that, Joe's songs draw deeply on the Missouri of his youth and the North Carolina of his adulthood. Renowned for his clawhammer banjo playing, Joe has won multiple awards from the IBMA, and was a frequent performer on A Prairie Home Companion.