The Kitchen Sisters Present

For over 100 years, young women came at twilight to the Alamo and the plazas of San Antonio with makeshift tables and big pots of chili to cook over open fires. The plazas teemed with people—soldiers, tourists, cattlemen and the troubadours who roamed the tables, filling the night with music.

C.B. “Stubb” Stubblefield, namesake of the legendary club in Austin, Texas, had a mission to feed the world—especially the people who sang in it. When he started out in Lubbock, he generously fed and supported both black and white musicians, creating community and breaking barriers.

Stories of mothers and kitchens from playwright Ellen Sebastian Chang, cookbook author Peggy Knickerbocker, designer Cristina Salas-Porras, folklorist and creator/host of American Routes Nick Spitzer, and actress Robin Wright.

Cooking for the founding fathers — the story of Hercules and Hemings — the enslaved chefs of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And an interview with Zephyr Wright, President Lydon Johnson's cook who worked for the family for 27 years.

Carmen Miranda—Brazil's Ambassador of Samba, the highest paid woman entertainer in the world in the 1940s—her iconic turban piled high with fruit, her rapid fire Portuguese lyrics, her wild lens of samba and rhumba, captured the imagination of the world.

Stories of young Irish Traveller women. Travellers —the people of walking, sometimes called the gypsies of Ireland. Exploring ancient and modern Traveller rituals that cling on the edge of the Celtic Boom.

In the 1950s, a group of Montgomery, Alabama women baked goods to help fund the Montgomery bus boycott. Known as the Club from Nowhere the group was led by Georgia Gilmore, one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era. This story comes from Can Do: Portraits of Black Visionaries, Seekers, and Entrepreneurs, hosted […]

Convict cooking at the Angola Prison Rodeo, Tootie Montana and the legendary Mardi Gras Indians, Tennessee Williams, Two Sisters Cafe, The Court of Two Sisters, an eloquent ode to the Mint Julep and more stories Kitchen Sisters' stories from New Orleans.

Our show today is in honor of the beloved poet C. D. Wright who unexpectedly passed away recently. We interviewed C. D. in 2009 as part of a story we produced for our Hidden World of Girls series on NPR. And like all of our stories there are hours and hours of tape behind every […]

In 1948, Bill Hawkins became Cleveland’s first black disc jockey. He had a jiving, rhyming style. People gathered on the street to watch him broadcast from a glass booth at the front of his record store. His popularity grew rapidly. Over the next decade Hawkins was heard on up to four different stations on the same day. He had plenty of imitators and influenced a whole generation of DJs. Hawkins also had something else – a son he never knew. William Allen Taylor didn’t find out Hawkins was his father until he graduated from college. The two met once when Taylor was a teenager. At the time, Hawkins never hinted at who he was. And Taylor had no idea that he had met his father. Hawkins died before his son got to know him. There are no known tapes of Hawkins. Taylor became an actor and playwright. He lives in San Francisco. But he’s always wished he had a recording of his father’s radio program or even just a snippet of his voice.

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock 'n' roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.

"Somewhere in the world there's a Tupperware Party starting every 10 seconds." And we're going to one with The Kitchen Sisters.

We go behind the scenes, into rehearsals, sound checks, and the making of Way to Blue, a tribute to Nick Drake.

Michael Baronowski was a 19-year-old Marine when he landed in Vietnam in 1966. He brought with him a reel-to-reel tape recorder and used it to record audio letters for his family back in Norristown, Pennsylvania. He was killed in action in 1967. Produced by Jay Allison & Christina Egloff as part of Lost & Found Sound.

An all-girl radio station in Memphis—set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, Vietnam, and the death of Martin Luther King—the story of WHER continues following the women who pioneered in broadcasting as they head into one of the most dramatic and volatile times in the nation's history.