This Sunday marks a milestone for Radio Catskill’s weekly British and Irish folk program The Wagonload of Monkeys: its 600th episode.
“I’m astonished myself by being 600 shows!” said host Graham Rice.
Rice’s milestone follows an earlier run of roughly 250 episodes of an earlier program on the station, Britmix. After a break prompted by illness, he returned to the air with a new focus shaped by listener feedback.
“When I came back after being sick, I thought, ‘Well, let’s do a folk music show,’” Rice said.
Rice said his early musical influences came through the British blues boom, including artists such as Eric Clapton, before shifting toward electric folk groups including Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. A period living in Ireland deepened that interest.
“I lived in Ireland for a while and soaked up folk music over there because it’s part of those kind of national culture,” he said. “You can’t go to the pub, you can’t escape the music.”
He described folk music as a form of storytelling rooted in everyday life rather than formal cultural institutions.
“Music for the people, by the people,” Rice said. “Everybody else, whether they’re a plowman or a lacemaker, they’re just telling stories about their own experiences.”
Rice also emphasized the long exchange between British, Irish and American musical traditions, tracing how immigrant communities carried songs across the Atlantic and reshaped them over generations.
“You think people first immigrating from Ireland and Britain, they took their music with them,” he said. “That all got kind of absorbed and turned around and you end up with blues and all these things, which are basically a kind of hybrid Anglo-American music.”
On The Wagonload of Monkeys, Rice said the goal is to keep that tradition alive while highlighting contemporary artists who may not tour widely due to rising costs.
“Chances of seeing British and Irish singers come into play in our part of the world, it’s getting a bit thin,” he said. “So if I can bring the music on… that’s sort of a substitute for people who used to come into it.”
Rice said one recent project he featured involved Irish singer Cathy Jordan of The Dervish, who recorded new versions of traditional songs collected from across Ireland’s counties.
“She’s gone around every county in Ireland… and she’s found a traditional song that not many people know about and she’s made her own version of it,” he said.
He also uses geography as a storytelling tool, describing Ireland’s counties as a visual map that helps listeners situate the music.
“I look at the map of Ireland and it looks like a teddy bear,” he said.
Looking ahead, Rice said the format of the show will remain consistent, but he is open to listener suggestions for future themes.
“If anybody wants to drop me an email and say we’d like to hear songs about dogs, then I’ll do my best,” he said.
Image: Graham Rice, host of The Wagonload of Monkeys, Sundays at 3pm on Radio Catskill. (Graham Rice)