| Once more, Mike Flynn is bringing music from the foothills of
the Ozarks in Siloam Springs, Ark., to radio listeners as far away as Australia
and Greenland.
This well-know Ozarks music program actually began far away from the Ozarks. In 1958, when he was working at a radio station in Chicago, Flynn had the opportunity to begin a fifteen-minute program featuring the folk music he'd loved almost all of his 20 years. "The Folk Sampler" was first heard in 1959 on WMBI in Chicago. Not long after, Flynn took a radio job in Tulsa, and returned to school at the university there. "The Folk Sampler" moved to KBEZ in Tulsa, and then to KRAV. Though the location had changed, the music hadn't. . . it was still "music of the people," all the way, whether those people were rural folk in the Ozarks, cowboys, or sea shanty dwellers. For a time, Flynn and a partner
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also operated a storefront club in Tulsa called "The Dust Bowl,"
which featured folk music, pizza, and pop, on Friday and Saturday nights. Mike, no mean musician himself, began to perform together, and made it a permanent duo when they married in the late `60's. Not long after, they helped form Tulsa's Folk Music Society. Then success hit Mike Flynn big-time. After graduating from the University of Tulsa, he became a new anchor on Tulsa's KOTV, Channel 6. "The Folk Sampler" program faded and died, but Flynn's love of folk music lived on, an unerasable part of the former radio man's life. In 1977, the Flynns decided to leave the fast track in Tulsa. They moved
to the western edge of the Arkansas Ozarks, where he joined the communications
department at John Brown University in Siloam Springs.
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