Acoustic Workshop on CIUT 89.5FM

Monday Evenings 7:00pm to 8:00pm (North American Eastern Time Zone)

About the show

For fifteen years Rick Fielding was the host/programmer of the radio show "Acoustic Workshop" on CIUT 89.5. His wife, Heather Fielding, is continuing with the program and as much as possible will maintain the format that Rick established.

The program is devoted to acoustic music, primarily folk music of all kinds but not exclusively as it also features jazz, blues, bluegrass and more. The common demoninator is that it is acoustic music and,wherever possible, live music.

If you're interested in appearing (if that's the right word for a radio show) on Acoustic Workshop send Heather an e-mail at rfield@interlog.com.

A Brief History of the Acoustic Workshop by Rick Fielding

In 1989 I was invited to do an interview and sing some songs on CIUT's Monday Midnight Folk Show hosted by Jim Rider. After the show Jim told me he was going out of town for a couple of weeks to do some gigs and asked me if I would host the show while he was gone. It sounded like fun, and to make a long story short, Jim never came back to Toronto except for the odd visit. For the first few months I'm not even sure if CIUT's management was aware that the show had a new host. After all, there were never too many folks around the station at midnight on a Monday, often just the host, engineer, and an on-air guest. The CIUT building is an old white house on St. George Street and those late night shows had a wonderful "lonesome intimacy" to them. I was told by several people to keep an eye open for the "station ghost", but if the restless spirit ever checked out the "Folk Show" it wasn't long enough for me to notice. Perhaps spectres prefer hipper music.

I changed the name of the program to "Acoustic Workshop" because I wanted to treat each hour like a workshop at a festival, not just one song after another with some reading from liner notes in between. One of the greatest joys in my life has been learning not just the "what", but the how, when, and why, of acoustic music and I wanted to share this with the listeners. Over the years I've interviewed and jammed with hundreds of guests, had some positively strange nights and a great many wonderful memories. Were I to write a book about my journey through the world of folk music (which is a distinct possibility) the adventures I've had while hosting the radio show would be a substantial part of it.

Currently the show runs from 7-8 p.m., still on Monday night on CIUT 89.5 FM, and my wife Heather, known on air as my "teenage Scottish bride" for several years, now helps out in virtually every area of the show. "