Down Home Blues

KPBX 91.1, Saturday, 10pm-12midnight

Brion Foster features the finest in local, regional, national,
and international blues music.

Starting the show with its signature “KRASH” sound effect, Down Home Blues is an upbeat mixture of Texas Blues,
Chicago style boogie and just plain old rock & roll blues - with
a lot of surprises sprinkled in to sweeten the mix. Listeners are treated to a two hour show filled with plenty of contemporary artists representing the sound of the blues today, with classic blues cuts, great rock rarities and a lot of local blues acts thrown in throughout the show.

For the second year in a row, Down Home Blues has been nominated for “Best Blues Radio Program” by the Inland Empire Blues Society, based here in Spokane.

Brion Foster has been producing radio shows for many years, and in 2002 he brought his experience to Spokane Public Radio. Working in the “pirate” radio business in the early nineties,
Brion was an integral part of Republic Community Radio, a small station located in the town of Republic, Washington. During the nineties, Brion was broadcasting live shows three days a week, training young radio producers, engineering shows, and performing many other duties at RCR during the week. During this time, Brion was also doing weekend shows at KGRZ-FM, a low-power FM station in the tiny town of Curlew, Washington, just south of the Canadian border.

“We were just having fun, playing music for our friends, and with a broadcast range of only about 12 miles around us... but the FCC got involved and it all went downhill from there" (the laws for low-power FM stations were quite different then). "Curlew is a very small town, and KGRZ was the coolest thing happening there at that time, but they forced the owner to shut it down because we didn’t have the right licensing. The same thing happened in Republic.”

Eventually, KGRZ-FM and Republic Community Radio both ceased operation in the late nineties, and Brion moved his family to the Spokane area. While attending the Music program at Spokane Falls Community College, Brion worked through an internship at KPBX, which eventually led to the Down Home Blues show, a format he likes very well. “I grew up around the blues in West Texas, and have always felt it's the truest form of music out there- no fancy cars, no expensive clothes, no flashy videos, nothing but honesty… Blues is the only REAL music left!”