'Bound for Glory' -- live from Cornell for 35 years

By Bill Steele

Would you spend 34 years sitting at the same desk, doing the same job, every Sunday night?

Maybe, if your job was making magic.

That's how Phil Shapiro, M.A. '69, explains the fact that his radio show, "Bound for Glory," has just begun its 35th year on WVBR-FM. The show broadcasts a live folk music concert from 8 to 11 p.m. Sundays, when school is in session, from the Café at Anabel Taylor Hall on campus. When Cornell is on break, Shapiro plays albums from the WVBR studio. You can probably count on your fingers the number of times he has been out of town and allowed someone else to host the show.

The show has grown from a local showcase with occasional visiting guest stars to a major stop on the nationwide folk circuit. Shapiro, who came to Cornell as a graduate student in economics, started by playing records from WVBR's studio, then in the basement of Willard Straight Hall. He soon began to bring in local and visiting performers for interviews and a few live songs, adding two or three "remote specials" a year with live audiences. After a couple of years, live performances became the rule, rather than the exception.

"Bound for Glory" performers Sept. 23, broadcast live from the Cafe in Anabel Taylor Hall, are Cindy Mangsen and Steve Gillette. Richard Killen/University Photography

The word got around that Cornell audiences are among the best in the country, and even though the show offers performers no pay, nationally touring performers line up to appear. Folk-music "names" who have appeared in the small cafe include John Gorka, Michael Smith, Priscilla Herdman, Utah Phillips, Mike Seeger, Rosalie Sorrells, Kate Wolf, the Boys of the Lough, Christine Lavin and Bill Staines. (Seeger will be making a return visit in November.) Shapiro lists as one of the high points an appearance by Sam Hinton, one of the major figures in the folk music revival of the '40s and '50s. (Yes, there was folk music before the '60s.)

"It's just something musicians want to do," Shapiro says. They come, he says, because of the feedback they get from the live audience.

"The average folk performer is on the road for a reason," he explains. "There is something inside them they really need to say." But after a week or so of playing in bars or community college coffeehouses, where the crowds expect to hear covers of Madonna and Bruce Springsteen and don't listen to those anyway, they are ready for an audience that understands what they do and that wants to listen. The "Bound for Glory" audience not only listens, but sings along, applauds and laughs in the right places. They recognize references to Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Mother Maybelle Carter.

For the performers, "It validates their whole life: It says, 'Yes, you've made the right choice to share your life with us," Shapiro believes, and he sums it up as "making magic."

"In the last 10 years there has been incredible solidness in community support for the show," he adds, noting that he has seen the average age of the live audience go down in recent years. It seems undergraduates are coming back to "non-standard music," which embraces anything from contemporary acoustic songwriters to old-timey string bands to singers of traditional Appalachian ballads -- although the last are pretty scarce these days.

Many in the audience also help the show in concrete ways through the Friends of Bound for Glory, a nonprofit organization formed five years ago to raise money to pay for the electronic equipment needed to put on a quality show in a location remote from WVBR's studios, something the perpetually strapped station can't afford on its own.

The money all goes to equipment and services. Like the performers, neither Shapiro nor anyone else helping put on the show are paid. Shapiro offers special praise for the volunteer technical crew led by chief sound engineer Terry Kelleher.

The show makes another kind of magic for Shapiro: "'Bound for Glory' is my personal answer to forces in society that pull us apart from each other," he says. "It's my way of saying 'Let's come together as a community, we can share this, we don't have to be isolated.'"

Those interested in more information about the Friends of Bound for Glory can write to it at 143 Pine Tree Road, Ithaca, N.Y. 14850, or e-mail bfg@wvbr.com.