Dan Maher, the folk singer and producer whose program aired for decades on KPBX and other public radio stations in the Northwest, has died. His passing was confirmed on the Facebook page for “Good Roads,” his internet music program.
In 1982, KPBX in Spokane asked the rising young folk musician to create a regional weekly music program. He called it “Inland Folk.”
Maher grew up in Spokane. His interest in folk music began early in life, as he told a crowd at Spokane’s Northwest Folk Festival in 2017.
“My folks, they had visually impaired [children]. We were twins and the best way to keep a visually-impaired twin happy in those days was just to plunk them in front of the radio and that’s what they did.
"I remember when I was about five years old, the Kingston Trio came on with “Tom Dooley” and I went, ‘Wow, that’s just really neat that they can play that banjo and sing those harmonies.’ I was five years old and it just kind of went from there. So I was just a parasite off the folk revival.”
Maher developed a deep knowledge of folk music. He learned to play guitar and began his career as a performer, playing in clubs and festivals around the Northwest.
He was living in Pullman and working at Washington State University. Eventually, he began producing his program at what is now Northwest Public Broadcasting and put the tapes on the Greyhound bus so the program could continue to air in Spokane.
For more than 35 years, his show featured folk music from around the world, mostly from North America and the British Isles. Maher also actively promoted the regional music and arts scene.
Seattle musician Wes Weddell grew up in Pullman listening to “Inland Folk.” He appreciates that Maher played the music of artists who weren’t in the musical spotlight.
“He put musicians on the air that might not have found their way on the air otherwise and he did it with knowledge of their songs and their story. Because everything streams now, the value of that, the reach of that, is really tremendous.
“For Dan to be the level of performing musician he was and also the level of radio programmer he was is something, pretty remarkable. Both of those skills take a tremendous amount of dedication and a lot of people find their way to one or the other," Weddell said.
Maher says he had to learn that performing before a live audience is different than recording a radio show.
“Sometimes I would talk way too long between songs in those early years, because I was into telling stories and being a performer on stage and I kept thinking of the audience as a stage audience and so I had to actually pull back and be a bit more level and a bit more accurate about what I was saying about people and what I was saying about the music and making sure that I didn’t just fill it full of my opinions because I’m such a non-opinionated individual anyway," he said.
“Inland Folk” was ended by WSU in 2019 after Maher admitted he acted unprofessionally in a relationship with a student. But he continued producing a folk music program called “Good Road” for an internet radio station.
Dan Maher was battling cancer at the time of his passing.
