Lost Notes Fourth Season: Music History To Your Ears

 KCRW’s music documentary podcast, Lost Notes, returned for its fourth season in mid-March as co-hosts Novena Carmel (KCRW) and Michael Barnes (KCRW / KPFK / Artform Radio) guide listeners through eight wildly different and deeply human stories, each set against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of LA’s soul and R&B scene of the 1950s-1970s.

If you're interested in music history and how music influences culture and vice versa, Lost Notes is your sonic destination point.

Stories include:
● Gloria Jones was a gospel-trained teenage singer from LA whose greatest hit - 1965’s “Tainted
Love” - was never quite hers. But she went on to lead a double life as a hit songwriter for some of the greatest artists of all time … until a fortuitous rediscovery led to her coronation as the Queen of Northern Soul.
● Fela Kuti is known today as an iconic artist, innovator, and revolutionary … but in 1969, he was broke, exhausted, and in hot water with the Feds after a disastrous American tour. Yet a chance
meeting transformed his musical and political consciousness, creating what we now know as Afrobeat right here on the streets of LA.
● For decades, Ruth Dolphin was only thought of as “Mrs. John Dolphin” - the wife of the Dolphin’s of Hollywood record man, who was murdered in February 1958. But now, for the first time, we set
the record straight on Ruth’s own unique and unsung genius as the head of a revived and thriving LA musical empire in the decades that followed.

Other stories run the gamut from the secret Hollywood hideout of a pair of legendary musical brothers; the surprising cultural intersections behind a Chicano rock classic; and the darkly hilarious schemes of a
female record-label magnate, who instigated one of the most absurd court cases in music history.

Lost Notes takes its time between seasons, and one of my favorite seasons was number two in September 2020. That season of Lost Notes decamped in 1980, exploring the times and the music. That season is definitely worth a listen.

 Episodes of note include one on Minnie Riperton, who was famous because of one part in one song. “Lovin’ You.”  That song was Riperton’s biggest hit, and she doesn’t sing that magic, piercing note until around the three-minute mark. Cancer took Riperton away tragically in 1979, and the next year producers got to work on a posthumous album.

In another episode, Jazz musician Hugh Masekela and singer Miriam Makeba, who were two exiled from South Africa, attempted to return home to South Africa for a concert. The 1980 concert wound up happening in neighboring Lesotho — and the performance became about defiance, namely against the Apartheid government in South Africa.

My favorite episode is about Stevie Wonder, who released seven albums from 1970 to 1976. It is an unprecedented run of albums and songs, one of the greatest in music history. Then, in 1979, he faced his first defeat of the decade. Reviews for “Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants” were harshly mixed. So in 1980 Stevie was due for a comeback. Then-Lost Notes-host Hanif Abdurraqib reflected on the album and Wonder’s call for the observation of Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday.

Crammed with rigorous and original research, delivered in lively and hilarious banter, and sound tracked by cratefuls of incredible music, Lost Notes delivers another knockout slate of first-rate music journalism, dressed in a characteristically gorgeous sonic setting. It’s a must-listen event for any aficionado of music history and great storytelling.