Soul on the Wire is a Contemporary Arts Project featuring a soul radio station based in Pinhook, Missouri.
Pinhook was an old sharecropper town founded in the 1920s near the Mississippi River. In 2011, Pinhook was destroyed by flooding when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers breached the Bird’s Point Levee to save the larger town of Cario located downstream. Before the inundation, the black residents were given two hours’ notice to save their possessions.
Down in the basement of the red brick building that once housed the local black radio station SOTW, boxes containing a number of old reel to reel audio tapes of recorded shows from the station were saved.
Soul on the Wire will feature one of these tapes. A radio program focused on the Vietnam war which was raging at the time. Accompanying the radio program, a 50 minute movie will also be screened.
Soul on the Wire is presented by artists Stephen Williams and Dave Sinclair. Both have 40 years background in collecting soul music and many years in radio, including shows on 3PBS.
Soul on the Wire is on at One Star Gallery 301-303 Victoria Street, West Melbourne on Friday August 23 and Saturday 24 at 7pm and on Sunday 25th at 3 pm. It is free.