Artists:Michael Johnathon

Michael Johnathon is a folksinger, songwriter, concert performer, author ... and now playwright ... who has a worldwide radio audience approaching a million listeners each week. He also created the world’s first multi-camera weekly series broadcast on the Internet.

This ‘Woody Guthrie in a Cyber World” grew up in upstate New York along the shores of the Hudson River. At 19 years old, he moved to the Mexican border town of Laredo, Texas and found a job working as a late night DJ on KLAR-FM. One night, he played Turn, Turn, Turn by the 60’s folkrock group The Byrds. As the song played, he recalled seeing Pete Seeger and Harry Chapin performing in his Dutchess County hometown in New York. By the time the song ended, he decided to pursue a career as a folksinger.

Two months later, he bought a guitar and a banjo and settled into the isolated mountain hamlet of Mousie, Kentucky. For the next three years, he traveled up and down the hollers of the Appalachian mountains knocking on doors and learning the music of the mountain people. Michael experienced hundreds of front porch hootenannies throughout Appalachia where folks would pull out their banjos and fiddles, sit on their front porches with him and play the old songs that their grandparents taught them.

Soon enough, he began performing concerts at hundreds of colleges, schools and fairs. He performed two thousand Earth Concerts, plus benefits for the homeless, farm families, and shelters helping battered women and children. In all, he sang to over two million people in one four-year stretch. Billboard Magazine headlined him as an “UnSung Hero.” He has been featured on CNN, TNN, CMT, AP, Headline News, NPR, Bravo and the BBC.

Aside from touring, writing and recording he continues work on create new projects. A few years ago, Michael released his first book and CD gift set called WoodSongs. The book included the 16-song, all-acoustic WoodSongs compact disc. The musical highlight of the album is a duet of a mountain song titled New Wood that he performs with the legendary Odetta and an eight piece cello section. Other featured musicians on the CD include Grammy winning banjo master JD Crowe, Appalachian icon Jean Ritchie and others.

The success of the WoodSongs book and CD resulted in the creation of radio’s only syndicated live-audience program dedicated to brilliant but unknown artists. The show, called the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour, is recorded each week before a theatre audience and broadcast on over 460 stations from Australia to Boston to Ireland with well over one million listeners tuning in each week. The multi-media folk program is completely run by volunteers and available as a syndicated radio show plus online streaming, archiving, podcasting and now as a national TV series airing on PBS stations in 2006.

See also Michael Johnathon And The Folkboy Orchestra.