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Page Wilson recording with Scott Nygaard and Tim and Mollie O’Brien (Photo courtesy Virginia Wilson)
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Wilson and Virginia Blue in 1995 (Photo courtesy Virginia Wilson)
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Virginia Blue in the recording studio (Photo by Benjamin GT Mavelil)
The slap of a screen door and the scuff of boots on a creaky hardwood floor. A cheerful honey-on-gravel voice wonders aloud, “Let’s see if we can get ’em to pick us a tune.”
When heard on Richmond radio in the 1990s and early 2000s, these sounds signified a transition into the kitchen of a Chickahominy Swamp cabin imagined by Page Wilson (1954-2011) for his “Out O’ the Blue Radio Revue.”
Now, a team of veteran broadcasters, engineers and family returns Wilson to the air for eight successive Saturdays beginning May 29, at noon and 8 p.m.
“Which is really cool, since this was Page’s time slot when the shows originally aired,” says veteran broadcaster and friend of Wilson Tim Timberlake, who took on the project. “This will be an eight-week series of hourlong shows running Saturdays beginning May 29 featuring live performances from many of the prominent Americana artists who played for their supper in Page’s kitchen. Solid gold from three decades ago.”
The programs, introduced by Wilson’s daughter Virginia Blue Wilson, are edited versions of those “kitchen” portions of the show, during which the featured guests performed and Wilson sometimes joined in.
Wilson’s survey of, in his most apt description, “purebred American mongrel music,” began in 1988. The program broadcast on three separate Richmond stations in succession, with breaks caused by radio’s whimsical format changes. The “Revue” found a permanent home on public radio in 1996 on WCVE-FM, which slotted the show on Saturdays from 8 to 10 p.m.
Timberlake led the undertaking of broadcasting these adapted encore presentations. He also serves with the nonprofit music awareness and education group JAMinc. Virginia Public Media, through In Your Ear Studios, has aired highlights of JAMinc concerts, and in August 2020, a livestreamed series of in-studio concerts began. But the pandemic precluded JAMinc’s live shows.
And that’s how the semiretired Timberlake — at the suggestion of his wife, writer Deveron — decided to return not only Wilson’s engaging voice to the air but also the array of spectacular talent that he invited into the “kitchen.”
Wilson mixed the local with the legendary and lured them in from the road tours that brought them to Richmond.
Timberlake reels off names of those who joined these lively sessions: Townes Van Zandt, the Tony Rice Unit, Marcia Ball, C.J. Chenier, Robert Earl Keen, Indigo Girls, Tim and Mollie O’Brien, Mary Chapin Carpenter, homegrowns such as the late John Cephas with Phil Wiggins, and others.
The sessions, some recorded 30 years ago, occurred primarily at the Alpha Audio Studios and the Flood Zone, venues vanished into Richmond music lore.
How this revival of “Out O’ the Blue” happened is something of a rescue story.
Artist Jude Schlotzhauer, married to Wilson for 15 years, kept several large file boxes containing 10-inch master tapes that held the old shows.
“I was at almost all of those recordings,” she recalls. “It was magical — it really was.”
She experienced several of the sessions while pregnant with Virginia Blue, who would vigorously move around once the music started. “When the music stopped, she’d calm right down,” Schlotzhauer recalls, “and then start up again with the music.”
At various times during Wilson’s career, the Mechanicsville native was a singer-songwriter — “My first album went concrete, the second went lead,” he wryly remarked in a 2009 Richmond magazine profile — a hitchhiking troubadour, a festival organizer, a promoter, a “views paper” publisher, the lead of the band Reckless Abandon and, most prominently, a radio personality.
Wilson put guests at ease with his gregarious nature and hospitality that included sponsor-made food that he brought in to the studio. From his own experience, he knew traveling musicians enjoyed food and camaraderie. The guests and Wilson formed a bond evident in the broadcasts.
The tapes, however, sat in Schlotzhauer’s garage, though she tried to find someone to preserve them — like Timberlake, who knew what it would take to save them. “I thought that if anybody could pull this off, he can,” Schlotzhauer says.
About three years ago, the opportunity opened for transferring the masters to digital. The condition of the old tapes offered a challenge, so Timberlake called upon audio technician Guy Spiller, who’s made a second career out of preserving vintage video and audio recordings with his Analog Retentive company. He also co-founded the bygone WVGO-FM — the second Richmond station to air the “Revue”.
“He’s a genius engineer,” Timberlake enthuses, “and his house in Powhatan is a museum of analog tape machines — and they all work because he knows how to fix them.”
Spiller and audio engineer Charlie Reilly undertook the painstaking process of restoration, which begins with cooking the tapes in a food dehydrator. After a cooling time, the transfer to digital may begin.
Not obvious then, however, was whether the “Revue” would ever be heard again.
Timberlake understood that the heart of the show came in the kitchen sessions, which required repackaging the material. “This means editing it so it doesn’t sound edited,” he says. Enough of the between-songs fun is retained to give listeners either a nostalgic rush or introduce them to Wilson’s combination of patter and playing.
Another challenge came with tracking down either the artists or their estate managers to request permission to air their work. Timberlake called upon his wide array of connections. “Nobody said no,” Timberlake explains, “and I got to enjoy some of the most incredible conversations with these fantastic players.”
Some didn’t remember the sessions, others did after prompting. Another contributor is artist Bill Nelson, whose theater posters and magazine cover art made him well known. He created the art for promoting this return to the “Revue.”
Virginia Blue Wilson describes hearing these remixed programs as emotional. She periodically listens to her father’s music but hasn’t experienced the radio revue in a long while. The “Revue” began with Wilson’s signature ballad, “Virginia,” once in the running to become the state song.
“What I heard for the first time, really,” she notes, “was the signoff at the end.”
“Well it is night-night time or naptime somewhere on the planet, Miss Virginia Blue Wilson. Time for you to go to bed. Sweet dreams; quit all that dancin’ around the house.”
When 10 p.m. rolled around, young Virginia was asleep.
“It’s exciting that this is going to happen,” Timberlake says. “It’s been on the back burner for so long, and now it feels like this was meant to be.”
As Wilson said in his theme song, “Sometimes just a memory is all you have to call home.”
