About Us

JoAnn Mar is cofounder and cohost of “Folk Music & Beyond.” She initiated the show in October 1988 at a time when KALW had very few locally produced live music shows and relied mostly on pre-recorded network programs. Even after hosting the program for over 34 years, JoAnn believes there’s still so much more to learn. Each show is lovingly hand-crafted and created from scratch and done from the intuitive perspective of an ordinary listener and music fan, not from the ivory tower vantage point of a scholar or academic. And this program is most certainly not assembled robotically through algorithms or streaming playlists. This program is intended for listeners with open hearts and minds. If you consider yourself a purist or so-called “expert,” this may not be the program for you. JoAnn’s efforts have drawn national attention outside of the Bay Area and in 2021, she was inducted into Folk Alliance International’s Folk DJ Hall of Fame.

When she isn’t busy with “Folk Music & Beyond,” JoAnn is an independent radio producer and has produced award-winning documentaries on various topics, including Chinese garment workers, private prisons, dieting, women’s music, and date rape. JoAnn’s latest radio projects explore death and dying and how care at the end of life has evolved.

Bob Campbell has been a translator, computer programmer (mostly in the C language), author of computer user guides, and editor. He has long been involved in radio; he is at bottom an engineering type who was once drafted as a substitute music programmer and heard to have an ear for a segue. He has been active in environmental causes, cares most deeply for endangered species and ecosystems, as well as for our experiential bond with the natural world, and most responds to songs that speak to those issues. In these very difficult times, people are writing songs offering their visions of awakening and how to face the future with courage, and he’s been sharing them as he finds them.

Bob has a long-standing interest in Taoist and Buddhist thought, is growing more aware of Indigenous values, and is studying the Enneagram (he is a type 5).

He aspires to be a child of the present and open to the new.