Celtic Music: The Thistle & Shamrock

Fiona Ritchie, a native of Scotland, began The Thistle & Shamrock, her one-hour Celtic music radio show on WFAE-FM, a Charlotte, North Carolina public radio station, in 1981. She'd first gone to Charlotte on a six-month stint as a teaching assistant in the psychology department of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. After returning to Scotland and graduating with honors in psychology from the University of Stirling, she returned to Charlotte and joined the team of the then-new WFAE. Within two years, her show was picked up for national distribution on National Public Radio. Ritchie became the full time producer and host of the show in 1986. She moved production of the show to Edinburgh, Scotland in 1990 and currently produces the show from an 18th-century stone building in a rural Scottish village.

The show began with a small collection of LPs and has expanded with the advent of CDs and later with MP3s. The LP collection is still used as many recordings didn't make the transition to the more modern formats. Not too long ago, Ritchie did an entire show with music from LPs, complete with pops, clicks and hisses. The show even included one selection from an LP dating back to her teenage years.

The show's website, Thistleradio.com, provides plenty of information about the show and its host, playlists, National Public Radio stations that broadcast the show, and a very useful list of stations that stream their broadcasts over the Internet. This allows anyone anywhere in the world access to the show, and is handy if you miss the show when it's broadcast locally. The show is on the NPR Worldwide schedule and is broadcast over the Eutelsat Hotbird satellite to Europe, Western Russia, Northern Africa and the Middle East.

Ritchie has introduced Thistlepod to the show's website. It consists of samplers of new music, or "tasters" as she calls them, received in the studio. The music is often given full-length treatment on the show soon after. You can subscribe to podcasts using iTunes, MyYahoo, or Zune. Podcasts can also be downloaded directly to your computer.

In May of 2009 a new and long-awaited feature was introduced. Now the three latest shows can be heard again online at Thistleradio.com. A new show won't be available immediately, so you might still want to check the listings for radio stations that offer the show in streaming format while they are broadcasting it over the air. This new feature makes it easier for you to listen to the show at a time of your choosing.