Welcome To Michael Johnathon.com

-Bob Spear - Publisher, HEARTLAND REVIEW

"Michael Johnathon is a folksinger, songwriter, concert performer, author who created and hosts the worldwide broadcast of the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour with a radio audience with over a million listeners each week on 500 public radio stations, PBS-TV coast-to-coast plus American Forces Radio Network in 173 nations. He also created the world's first multi-camera weekly music series broadcast on the internet. Michael is also a playwright ... his play Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau has over 8,000 registered performances in 42 countries and translated into four languages.

His latest CD release is "Front Porch" (download the one sheet PDF) and his third book, "WoodSongs III - A Folksinger's Social Commentary and Front Porch Manual" will be released in the spring of 2012.

This 'Woody Guthrie in a Cyber World' grew up in upstate New York along the shores of the Hudson River. At 19 years old, he moved to the Mexican border town of Laredo, Texas and found a job working as the late night DJ on a small radio station. One night, he played 'Turn, Turn, Turn' by the 60's folk rock group The Byrds. As the song played, he recalled seeing the songs writer, his neighbor Pete Seeger, performing in his Dutchess County hometown in New York. By the time the song had ended, he decided to pursue a career as a folksinger.

Two months later, he bought a guitar and a banjo and settled into the isolated mountain hamlet of Mousie, Kentucky. For the next three years, he traveled up and down the hollers of the Appalachian mountains knocking on doors and learning the music of the mountain people. Michael experienced hundreds of front porch hootenannies where folks would pull out their banjos and fiddles, sit on their front porches with him and play the old songs that their grandparents taught them.

Soon enough, he began performing concerts at hundreds of colleges, schools and fairs. He performed two thousand Earth Concerts, plus benefits for the homeless, farm families, and shelters helping battered women and children. In all, he sang to over two million people in one four-year stretch. Billboard Magazine headlined him as an "UnSung Hero." He has been featured on CNN, TNN, CMT, AP, Headline News, NPR, Bravo and the BBC.

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