AMERICAN ROUTES: THE NEW ADDITION TO THE KRCU-FM SCHEDULE AIRS AT NOON SATURDAYS

Nick Sitzer is an artesian well of knowledge about American music. The host of the public radio show "American Routes" loves the idea of playing a song by country balladeer Ray Price back-to-back with one by blues belter Etta James hoping his audience will understand why.

"Both ask you to evaluate what they sing about as something they've experienced," he says. "Fundamentally, it's a blues point of view. That's what happens with old ballads when they collide with the blues. You're getting people singing about their troubles and working through their troubles in songs, in some ways finding joy in their troubles."

"American Routes," a new addition to the KRCU 90.9 FM schedule, airs at noon Saturdays. Now syndicated in nearly 200 markets, it is Public Radio International's fastest-growing show. "American Routes" has a reputation for inspired eclecticism and for Spitzer's insightful understanding of the ways all the many different kinds of American music fit together.

Spitzer is a former Smithsonian Institution folklorist who has been making field recordings of musicians since the 1970s -- "shoe shine men and tap dancers, fortunetellers and freight trains rolling through small towns in New Mexico," he says. He now lives in New Orleans and produces his show there. "We're here because Louisiana has produced music with impact out of proportion to other places," he said in a phone interview.

Gumbo of influences

"American Routes" is a play on words that represents two of the most important aspects of American music -- its sources and the migrations that have changed it. "It's about transformation as much as rootedness," Spitzer says.

New Orleans music is a gumbo of Celtic influences, old-time country and blues, West African cultures and French music. "Old worlds mixing with other old worlds are creating new music that feels old," Spitzer says.

Some two-hour "American Routes" are built around an interview with an important musical figure, such as Randy Newman or Willie Nelson. But Spitzer will show that they did not create their music in a vacuum. Newman, for instance, is a fan of Gershwin, the instrumental Jewish folk songs called klezmer music, the blues and shuffles. All can be heard in his music.

Newman, who composed the Three Dog Night hit "Mama told Me Not to Come," was heard again in last weekend's Mother's Day show.

Restoring context

The main interview in this week's show is with Wilco, a popular Midwestern roots band. Jeff Tweedy, one of its Belleville, Ill., members, voices the opinion during the first hour that no traditional music is left in his region of America. Spitzer chooses not to contradict him but brings out a friend who is an expert in the music of the Upper Mississippi River Valley. He plays some of Missouri's French music, some fiddle tunes, some blues along with music by Chuck Berry and Miles Davis.

"He is part of a generation that grew up without a sense of context," Spitzer says of the Wilco musician. "Our job is to restore a sense of context."

Spitzer doesn't play much music from the 1980s and 1990s or new music because commercial radio has that covered. "There is a lot of enduring music that not everyone necessarily knows that is new to them," he says.

When he plays country music, it's by people like Nelson or John Hartford, not Shania Twain. He says today's country music has abandoned its elders and their core values.

"It has been flattened, compressed and commodified," he says. "I call it country and suburban music."

Rethinking theory

Public radio programmers haven't been all that adventurous themselves over the past 15 years, often sticking rigorously to a classical format, a jazz format or a news format for fear their core listeners would stray if they heard something else. The popularity of "American Routes" has put that theory in question.

"Around the networks they're saying, They're not doing public radio the way they're supposed to," Spitzer says.

Something that amazes Spitzer about the migrations that created new music is the number of rural musicians who have become "world progressives." John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Nina Simone and Pharaoh Sanders are small-town musicians who became important figures in jazz. He has a theory about them.

"I believe there was something incredibly healthy coming from these small, stable, sometimes conservative African American communities. I think it gives them confidence in themselves and a spirituality," he says.

"When Coltrane died, Pharaoh Sanders said he had to be assimilated into the godhead. He couldn't go any further."

It's that kind of information orbiting in Spitzer's head that has programmers appealing to him to be more of a verbal presence on the show, but he prefers to let the music do most of the talking. "I view radio as a visual medium," he says. "I would like people to exercise their own imaginations."

His show is constructed of "transitions based on metaphor and subterranean significance I would like people themselves to figure out," he says.