I can’t remember the last time I heard Phoebe Snow’s “Poetry Man” on the radio. But 40 years after the song first hit the airwaves, Philip Kearns is working to make sure her music is not forgotten with a tribute show he’s been playing around the Triad for about a year now.
It’s not surprising that you don’t hear Ms. Snow on the radio, which programs almost exclusively by genre. Like many talented musicians, Phoebe Snow transcended any single genre, and the music she created measured soul, jazz, rock and pop into a blend that was distinctly her own. Coming to prominence in the middle of the 1970s, she was one of the last of the great singer/songwriters who populated the charts in the early part of that decade, and one of the last of a breed of popular musicians who eschewed pop pablum to make her own kind of music, as Cass Elliot would say.
Christine Hall has been working as a journalist since the 1970s. She currently hosts a weekly radio show of sixties music, The Sixties in 60 that can be heard every Sunday at 6 pm Eastern Time on The Barrel of Rock.