Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber

A “Global Citizen” on Local Radio

The WFHB team broadcast the 2016 Lotus Live sessions from the Blockhouse Studios on the northwest side of town, shown in Figure 2.15. Rocky Dawuni’s session takes place during deejayspikes’s half of WFHB’s Friday afternoon eclectic music mix, with Jim Manion, a founding member of the station and the Music Director from its first broadcast in 1993 until his retirement in mid-2021, hosting the interview.[1] In his decades on the air, Manion spun his own eclectic mix show every Monday afternoon from 3-5 p.m., a role that made him one of WFHB’s most consistent on-air voices in addition to his management duties, which included frontline roles such as training all volunteers intending to use the station’s broadcasting equipment and conducting outreach among local musicians and music organizations. Manion is not originally from Bloomington—he was born and raised in Evansville, about two hours to the southwest—but has lived in town since sometime before the station’s founding in 1975 (Howley 2005). His father worked in commercial radio and television (LoPilato 2021). He is by no means a representative stand-in for everyone in the South-Central Indiana communities that fall within the WFHB signal, which include many politically conservative residents and many students from outside the region, state, and country, as well as countless other people with very different experiences from Manion’s. Nonetheless, his longstanding presence and thus recognizability of his voice on the airwaves, his regional roots, and to some extent even his broadcasting lineage position him as a figure of locality in the WFHB context.

Imaginaries of place precede Rocky Dawuni’s entrance into the studios ahead of his outdoor Friday and Saturday performances. Next to a photo of him on the Lotus Festival website is a barebones heading: “Rocky Dawuni / Reggae, Ghana.” A biography follows:

The Afro Roots sound of Ghanaian musician and social activist Rocky Dawuni has been influenced by the soulful music of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti and the positive messages and deep grooves of Bob Marley. Rocky’s songs straddle musical boundaries between Africa, the Caribbean and the U.S. Infectious grooves pair with stirring anthems meant to unite generations, and cultures. You’ll hear a healthy dose of reggae in Rocky’s sets, too. Dawuni is only the second African musician to be nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Reggae Album” category. “Much like the blues, reggae is the root of so much popular music,” he says. “I am proud to contribute to its grand tradition and legacy.”

Already, travel narratives surround Dawuni’s public presentation. His repertoire as presented here spans vast swaths of genre and geography; the specific boundaries it names hearken back to Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic as a “transcultural, international formation” (1993, 4). Naming influences, places, and genres clarifies Dawuni’s conception of “Afro Roots” in ways that comply with White’s suggestion to “be more specific about what is meant by ‘hybrid’” (2012, 207) as a non-essentialist listening strategy for world music consumers, though it is unclear how well it transcends the “theoretical terms like creolization and syncretism” that Gilroy finds “manifestly inadequate” (1993, 15) in discussing the Black Atlantic. This is in part because the authorship of the biography is unclear, leaving it in an ambiguous space regarding the transit narrative/road narrative binary for which Draisey-Collishaw finds it necessary “to locate ‘the last word’ in an exchange” (2018, 337). The asynchronous space of the festival website and the third-person nature of Dawuni’s biography makes such a determination difficult. The included quote from Dawuni implies that the biography is an outsider’s perspective, but it is also easy to imagine him having a hand in the writing or at least approving of the piece.

After Manion gets his cue from deejayspikes, likely over headphones tuned in to the radio station, he introduces Dawuni, his band, and the Lotus Live on WFHB session, then invites the ensemble to begin their first track, “Jammin’ Nation.” Originally recorded on Dawuni’s 1998 album, the 2016 live rendition sounds markedly different; Dawuni’s lead vocals occasionally stray from the key established by his backing singers and the plugged-in layers of guitar and synth supporting them over reggae beats. Moments of alteration in tone and timbre and Dawuni’s post-song chuckles underscore the liveness of the performance, perhaps, as Philip Auslander theorizes, fostering for the audience a “sense of being connected experientially to something while it is happening while also remaining at a distance from it” (2023, 26). Such aural cues mobilize the intimacy of the medium to evoke feelings of community. Dawuni’s voice overlaps with Manion’s announcement that there are “strong reggae vibes in the studio this afternoon,” placing them in the same physical space. In a further act of narrative emplacement, Manion thanks the band for making it “through all the wind and rain to get here to Blockhouse Studios today,” marking not only the group’s current space but the journey that they, Manion, and all other parties involved have taken that day. He then asks about the Afro Roots category advertised in Dawuni’s Lotus biography:

Jim Manion: Now, Rocky, we heard a strong reggae vibe in that first song here, but you’re not strictly reggae, right?

Rocky Dawuni: Yes.

Manion: You’re more Afro Roots.

Dawuni: Yeah, my sound is Afro Roots. So, basically, it’s really a fusion of reggae music, you know, American gospel, Afrobeat, highlife of West Africa. I try to be really, you know, try to make my sound representative of who I am, which is a global citizen that is influenced by global culture.

Manion: And you’re originally from Ghana?

Dawuni: Yes, from Ghana.

Manion: So you were influenced by Fela, Bob Marley, everything coming at you, American R&B, the whole mix.

Here, Manion both refutes the essentialization of the Lotus website caption and affirms the primacy of that same site’s longer (artist-given) narrative, all but reciting it in his line of questioning as Dawuni positions himself as a “global citizen.” He expands:

Dawuni: Well, you know, the thing is that everybody you know, regardless of who you are, you always realize that in your record collection, you listen to an eclectic array of music.

Manion: Yeah.

Dawuni: So as an artist, reggae music and traditional African music were my first foundations, but then those other styles that really I felt inspired me as an artist who really wanted to use his voice as a means to also communicate. There were certain musical styles that initially were attractive to me, which was reggae, Afrobeat, and of course, you know, funk music and American R&B. Those are the foundations, but then as I travel around, too, I pick up various styles from various places that I go.

Here, Dawuni ties his music to narratives of global encounter in which he asserts his own agency as a traveler, not limited by predetermined generic and geographic categories, but capable of identifying the roots of his own hybrid sound and expressing them to his audiences. In this case, those audiences are presumed to be residents of South-Central Indiana, who may be more familiar with the American styles Dawuni mentions than the specifics of Ghanaian and West African popular culture.

Dawuni’s second song, “Shine a Light,” features a son clave rhythm, upbeat call-and- response vocals, and more instances of pitch shifts between recording and live session; Manion refers to the track as “mixing up all sorts of ‘Afro Roots;’ a very strong New Orleans parade beat on that song,” then gives Rocky time only to introduce the final song of the session, “Afroroots Vibration,” a song that directly addresses Dawuni’s musical style: “We go take highlife music / Then we go add reggae music / We go take Afrobeat,” sings Dawuni, reiterating his influences in Kru English, a language that both signifies his Ghanaian roots and is, in the case of this song, likely largely comprehensible to English-speaking audience members in the United States. This linguistic choice also pays tribute to Fela Kuti, many of whose songs famously used “pidgin English to cast his message wide” (Spencer 2010)[2]. This song serves as another example of Dawuni controlling his own narrative of place, particularly where the origins of his self-described Afro Roots style are concerned. The interview concludes with Manion asking Dawuni to introduce his band members and promote the albums he will be selling before Manion promises to “raise up the energy in the streets” at the festival and turns the airwaves back over to deejayspikes. While deejayspikes likely immediately took to the microphone during the synchronous broadcast, the archived recording includes a final few seconds of Manion, Dawuni, and the band chatting, laughing, and thanking each other for the session, a final gesture that preserves a totally spontaneous encounter for any future listeners. Talking face-to-face-to-airwaves-to-archives, Dawuni and Manion interrogate singular notions of place and sound. In doing so, they further complicate questions of genre and categorization in affectively rich ways amplified in the broadcast context.

The layers of mediated sound in this single live session are saturated with information about place and community. At the base of them are questions of the local, the global, and musical encounters. If community radio is hyperlocal, it stands to reason that any live programming, Lotus Live included, should be pertinent to the listening region. Who, though, makes that determination? In this case, multiple bodies work in tandem to establish the relevance of artists like Rocky Dawuni as relevant to South-Central Indiana. The Lotus Foundation, WFHB Community Radio, attendees and listeners, and Dawuni himself all shape and respond to sonic narratives generated by and within local media geographies. The Lotus website both reinforces Dawuni’s otherness through an overly simplified origin story (“Reggae, Ghana.”) and makes space for a biography in which he or at least his team can begin to establish a more complex narrative, one that is mirrored in WFHB’s web archive of the performance. Both Lotus and WFHB tend to silo artists with certain backgrounds into catch-all categories, albeit with some nuance. Lotus maintains that its event is a “World Music and Arts Festival,” but rarely goes a year without also including Anglophone North American and even Bloomingtonian ensembles. Internally, as previously noted, WFHB has long opted for the term “international” in categorizing albums marketed as world music. While this may move away from the specific connotations of commodification that “world music” invokes, it nonetheless maintains a separation between local and otherwise global. Further, its archives keep Lotus Live sessions separate from Local Live sessions and, more conspicuously, the Firehouse Sessions that feature other touring artists from outside of Lotus events. This is defensible as a practical choice, but it also underscores and inscribes the importance of geographic separation in WFHB’s conception of musical performances.

With the exception of performances by local artists scheduled to perform at the festival, Lotus Live performances are usually based on the presumption of otherness as spread through aurally and visually mediated narratives of “world music.” Against this backdrop, though, the community radio space offers aural possibilities for intervening against totalizing imaginaries. Manion has a voice that is sonically identifiable as local for longtime listeners; as the session host, he is also contextually legible as having authority within the hyperlocal broadcast context even for those less familiar with WFHB’s personnel. In the university town of Bloomington, Dawuni’s accent may or may not resonate with listeners as signaling local insider- or outsiderness, a question that would require much deeper ethnography into what constitutes a South-Central Hoosier identity, but Manion’s introduction frames Dawuni with the travel narrative of being a Lotus performer from Ghana, and Dawuni’s singing in Kru English vocally performs a Ghanaian-rooted identity. It is in the intimacy of their conversation, their shared space at the Blockhouse Studios, the sonic layers of Dawuni’s musical performances (music, lyrics, and other artifacts), and Dawuni’s opportunity to counter the set script with his own “road narratives” that make the community boundaries permeable, if still present. The session positions Dawuni as a temporary visitor to a site centered around a sense of locality, but it also highlights an encounter between two voices in which both can lay simultaneous sonic claim to a shared space. Dawuni may be a global citizen, but he is one with a sense of place, and expresses his belonging in multiple contexts including the studio in his Lotus Live session.

[1] Audio embedded in companion webpage.

[2] The homage to Kuti is even clearer in the recorded version of this song from 2005 album Book of Changes, which features heavy brass and call-and- response vocals between Dawuni and a group of audibly feminine background singers in clear tribute to Kuti’s signature Afrobeat style. This CD is not, however, present in the WFHB library, and I only listened to it long after the fact.