Boot LiquorBoot Liquor

Boot Liquor joined SomaFM in 2003, the only channel the network added that year, three years after Rusty Hodge moved the station from a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man to a full-time internet operation in February 2000. It has always sat oddly on a network otherwise built on ambient and downtempo, and it survives there because SomaFM runs on listener donations rather than advertising, so no sales department has ever had to explain the country channel to a client.

The rotation reaches back through the whole tradition — Merle Haggard and Buck Owens for the Bakersfield sound, Ralph Stanley for bluegrass, the Light Crust Doughboys and Maddox Brothers for western swing, John Prine and Todd Snider writing, and current alt-country from Carolyn Mark and Laura Benitez. Their own line is a musical intervention for the bedraggled soul.