All this week on The AIR, we bring you marathons of our music specialty programs. This is  a great way to give new readers and listeners a chance to sample our shows, and also give our staff a week off from having to produce anything new.

The marathons will begin at 7 AM and run for 24 hours. If you miss anything, don’t worry. We’ve found ways to keep these shows in rotation.

Today we showcase our flagship show, hosted by yours truly, Radio Free Charleston. To be specific, we’re running eight recent episodes of Radio Free Charleston Volume Five.

In case you’re wondering, haven’t heard, or just want to read it again, RFC Volume One was broadcast on WVNS Radio starting in 1989. RFC Volume Two is the video version of the show, which shines the spotlight on local music. RFC Volume Two is still an ongoing concern, although I produce it much less frequently than I did from 2006 to 20016, when I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis.

In 2014 I began RFC Volume Three as a weekly two-hour local showcase for Voices of Appalachia Radio.  When VOA mutated into The AIR a couple of years later, I re-christened it RFC Volume Four, and cut the running time to one hour per week. That was also when I began doing RFC International, which was where I played whatever non-local music I wanted for two hours a week.

In January 2020 I basically combined Radio Free Charleston and RFC International into one three-hour show, which oddly enough makes it almost exactly like the show I did for broadcast radio back three decades ago. Sometimes we recycle old episodes of RFC Volume Four and RFC International to fill out the three-hour show, and sometimes we just rip loose and do three full hours of coolness.

The end result of combining RFC and RFC International was creating a show that is not only more fun for me to do, but also has garnered way more listeners than any other online version of the program. So if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a listen all day Tuesday on The AIR.

Check PopCult every day this week to see what show we’ll feature as our daily marathon while your humble blogger crawls off to recover from The 2023 PopCult Gift Guide.