This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Kyle Kellams.
For decades, every Saturday night, KUAF listeners heard this at 9 p.m.:
"From the foothills of the Ozarks, this is the Folk Sampler. My name is Mike Flynn, with a program of folk, traditional, bluegrass and blues."
Mike Flynn and the Folk Sampler followed the Pickin Post with Mike Shirkey on KUAF Saturday nights for years. The Folk Sampler was also heard on scores of other stations around the country. For about 40 years, it could be heard not just on KUAF but on stations across the country, including Lamar, Colo.; Goshen, Ind.; Rexburg, Idaho; Barrow, Alaska; and Cooperstown, N.Y.
Mike Flynn died recently, and we invited three people who knew him well — singers and songwriters Crow Johnson and Donna and Kelly Mulhollan — to the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio One to remember him.
"I think the Folk Sampler was one of the most important folk programs in America. And little do we know, it came right here from the Ozarks — the foothills of the Ozarks. For one thing, Mike's program ran over 40 years. It was syndicated all across America, from coast to coast. It varied between 65 and 100 stations that were playing this program, including KUAF, and it came out of Siloam Springs. I think Mike had a real important role in deciding and sifting through all of the folk music that was being brought forth during that time period. He'd get promo from everybody out there. Every week, I bet he'd get 10 or 12 CDs and he would listen to every single one of them and he'd figure out what needed to rise to the surface."
And in his own words, this is what Mike Flynn said about the Folk Sampler:
"The Folk Sampler is about gardens and home and homegrown tomatoes. It's about making things with your hands. It's about small towns and hometown people. It's about big cities and the hurry that goes with them. The Folk Sampler is about train whistles in the night and sunshine in the morning. It's about slow-moving rivers and the sounds of wooden canoes. It's about horses in the barn, cows in the field, and people who enjoy taking care of them. It's about working in a factory or plowing a field. The Folk Sampler is about real people doing real things. It's about the stories we have to tell and the lives we live."
"What I loved about Mike Flynn and his show was he didn't think that there was a strict litmus test for folk music. If it sounded good, he wanted it. He was one of the few places that you could send your music when you were working on it, and it didn't have to be purist. It didn't have to be, 'What decade did that come from?' He was so supportive. I think his first service was to those of us who were listeners. But close second was to the artists."
"He had a relationship with many, many folk singers across the country because a long time ago — I don't know exactly what year — he became the main emcee at Winfield, Kansas, the Walnut Valley Festival, along with Mike Shirkey. And interestingly enough, he's the one who brought Mike Shirkey on as an emcee. And he brought Crow there."
"Yeah, he was nervous about it."
"I was. I went there and there were motorcycles and people with tattoos, which at that time — a long time ago — and I kept thinking, I'm a folk musician. What am I doing here?"
"Probably one of the reasons it was such a special show was because he had a relationship with a lot of these artists, because when you are the emcee at Winfield for Stage One — which is the big stage — all of the artists are backstage getting ready to play, and they're hanging out for hours just chit-chatting, noodling. Mike got to know them over the years. And over the years, they became good friends, too."
"Some voices just set you at ease the minute you hear them. He definitely had one of those. And he was thoughtful. He really put a lot of planning into his shows. Donna and I have been very thrilled to have spent a lot of time in his basement studio — it's one of my fondest memories. Their house had a studio. The basement was as big as our house, and it was lined with LPs and CDs for hundreds of feet, all perfectly alphabetized. And then there were card catalog files — the kind you'd see in a library. Somehow, every CD that had crossed his path, he had made cards for what the subject matter of each song was and put it in his card catalog. That's how he would assemble a show. He'd come up with a show about trains, he'd look in his file under 'trains,' and he'd start to find all the songs that had something to do with trains. This is all pre-internet, pre-computer. And it's just a tremendous amount of work to try to pull together a theme show like that. But he did it week after week for 40 years."
"You might hear someone who is really well known next to someone who was unknown."
"He didn't care — if the music was good, everybody had a chance. If you sent him your CD, he would listen to it. And if it caught his ear, you were on. And he'd write back to you, also."
"He wrote back to us. He'd respond. I don't know how he found the time. And when he would play one of our songs on his show, he would often send us a CD of that show, in the mail. How he could do that to so many musicians around the country — I'll never understand. But he did."
"Luckily, there is still an active website, folksampler.com — a very rich website that has all the shows listed. Every single song that ever got played is listed. There are articles about Mike's history. I invite anybody to have a look because it's still there, and I think it will be there. Laura is going to make sure it stays up. Part of the reason it's important to keep it intact is because we made an effort — Laura and I together — to get his archives uploaded to the Pacifica Radio Network. We've got part of that done now, and I'm very excited that community radio programs around America will be able to play the archives for free."
"15 different stations in Alaska were playing the Folk Sampler, and he and Laura would go up there some years and they would do a whole festival. He was a celebrity in Alaska. He was the voice of folk music in Alaska. But not just there. It was coast to coast. It was all over America."
"I think of it either with the windows open and you hear the cicadas outside, or you're in front of a hot stove or a fireplace. Listening."
"It was very tied to the season because he would do a holiday show. I made a little list of some of the show titles just to give people an idea of how diverse it could be: 'It's Cold Out There.' 'Dance with Me.' 'All for Love.' 'Dogs and Cats.' 'Let's Talk.' 'Let's Cry.' 'Hello, Mom.' 'Being Alone.' 'Healing.' 'Let It Go.' 'Money Talks.' 'Work Is Never Done.' And throughout the show he would remind you what the theme was — very elegantly, with a lot of wit and wisdom tossed in. A very graceful thing to hear."
"You're so right about the legacy part. Fayetteville — half the people that live here have only lived here for a short time. They're all kind of newcomers and they don't know this history. A lot of them never heard the Folk Sampler. That's one reason I think it's important that we're doing this today — because this is part of Fayetteville's history. Fayetteville is well known for having a rich folk scene, a music scene in general. Mike Flynn was a big part of that, and it's important to keep that legacy intact. We're talking 35, 40 years of weekly shows that were heard on KUAF. He was just there week after week. You could depend on it."
"I remember just recently when I brought home a stack of CDs from his archives and put them in my CD player and turned it on — 'From the foothills of the Ozarks' — and it just made me happy. It just flat out made me happy to hear that voice again and that familiar sound that was part of my week, every week, for so long."
Helping us celebrate the life and work of Mike Flynn were Crow Johnson, who is working on her new album, and Donna and Kelly Mulhollan, the duo Still on the Hill.
For 40 years, Mike Flynn hosted the Folk Sampler on stations across the country, including for decades on Saturday nights on 91.3 KUAF.
"From the foothills of the Ozarks, I'm Mike Flynn. Thank you for being such good company, and I'll see you next week here on the Folk Sampler."
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
