The ‘Routes’ back to roots

LAFAYETTE, La. — Contrary to what most of its devoted listeners probably believe,public radio’s popular folk-music program is “American Routes,” not “Roots,” but the double entendre is deliberate.

Five months after he was uprooted and rerouted to Lafayette by Hurricane Katrina, Nick Spitzer, the program’s founder and host, is returning it to its New Orleans base.

“Whether we’ll stay there forever, I don’t know, but right now we’re going to fly the flag and help to take care of the place and bring it back,” said Mr. Spitzer, who went on the air with “American Routes” in 1998 after decades of dreaming about a program that celebrates the diversity of American music instead of focusing on one format.

Now, the two-hour weekly program produced by Public Radio International is aired on nearly 300 National Public Radio affiliates, including WAMU-FM in Washington, where it airs from 10 p.m. to midnight on Saturdays. The show offers its estimated half-million listeners a smorgasbord of American musical genres: blues, jazz, gospel, bluegrass, country, Western swing, soul, zydeco, Cajun, Tejano even American Indian tribal music.

Mr. Spitzer, a former folklife specialist for the Smithsonian Institution, explained he and his wife evacuated New Orleans like hundreds of thousands of others in August when Katrina approached the city.

“First, we were just going to a high-rise hotel,” said Mr. Spitzer, 55, who also was teaching folklore at the University of New Orleans.

He relocated to Lafayette, where he had lived in the 1970s while researching his doctoral dissertation in anthropology for the University of Texas at Austin on zydeco music and Mardi Gras. He also knew Dave Spizale, general manager of KRVS, the NPR affiliate on the University of Louisiana at Lafayette campus.

The university provided “Routes” with an office in its library, while KRVS made its facilities available to Mr. Spitzer and put him in contact with an independent music producer in Lafayette with a backyard recording studio.

“We came to a sympathetic community,” said Mr. Spitzer. “It was a good match. Lafayette is kind of a low-key French Austin.”

A Connecticut native, Mr. Spitzer explained he first envisioned the idea of a roots-music program as an anthropology major at the University of Pennsylvania, but his appreciation of music dates to his childhood.

“My dad was a classical musician, and my mother loved American songs,” he said. “In the 1950s, when I was a little kid, I had an intimate relationship with my radio like so many kids did. I’d always been a loquacious kid, talking.

“When I got to college, I kind of wanted to do radio. I was in anthropology, but I realized that in that radio music library was a world of cultures, every bit as rich as I could learn in anthropology, maybe even richer, because it was art and expression, it was sound and sentiment. I began to feel that I could be a person that cared about and could interpret other cultures.”

He earned his master’s and doctorate in anthropology from UT-Austin, then spent seven years as a folklorist for the state of Louisiana before coming to the Smithsonian in 1985. For seven years, he produced a live radio series, “Folk Masters,” that aired Wolf Trap concerts among others.

After a three-year hiatus in Santa Fe, N.M., Mr. Spitzer said he decided, “I’m ready to do that ‘American Routes’ show” and it debuted on April 1, 1998.

He had to make two decisions first: the spelling of the title, and where to base the program.

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