Batista: Pitt art professor and Pittsburgh folk music expert

A folk music junkie paints among Pitt students.

Ken Batista, a Pitt studio arts… A folk music junkie paints among Pitt students.

Ken Batista, a Pitt studio arts professor, plays the music of troubadours from past and present generations as background music for his art classes. The twanging guitars and howling fiddles of his musical selections are not solely for Batista’s enjoyment – he’s working. Every week, Batista gets five to six new CDs, mostly unsolicited, and he wants to hear them before Sunday.

On Sunday mornings, Batista forsakes his roles as professor, husband and father to become Pittsburgh’s folk music ambassador to the world.

Batista volunteers as a DJ for WYEP, an independent, non-commercial radio station. His show, “An American Sampler” – “a program dedicated to folk music and acoustic blues” – can be heard from 7 a.m. until 11 a.m. Sunday mornings in Pittsburgh on 91.3 FM, and internationally through online streaming from the WYEP Web site.

Batista enters the empty studio at 6 a.m. to make the final preparations for his show. During the week, he listens to five hours of music for every single hour of programming he does. Other DJs at the radio station run their shows out of the WYEP library, but Batista brings in more than 200 CDs from his own collection every Sunday. For his four hours of airtime, Batista brings in eight hours of music that he’s already divided into sets of five CDs.

Though Batista has produced and hosted his folk show at WYEP for 10 years, he had no aspirations of becoming a DJ when he began to volunteer with the station 13 years ago. Batista is an artist and says he has been one “forever.” He studied art in college and graduate school, and he has been a professor at Pitt since 1978. After a “freak fall” forced him to undergo surgery on the arm he uses for painting, Batista began stuffing envelopes for WYEP as a volunteer.

“I wanted to give something back to the radio station because I listened to it all the time,” he says. Once Batista began volunteering at WYEP, the program director talked him into hosting a radio show.

The “sincerity and virtuosity” of folk music led Batista to host a folk-oriented show, he says.

“It’s not about hiding. It is music about the people,” Batista explains.

Sincerity and virtuosity were not always his priorities in musical choice. Like most kids, Batista grew up listening to the music he heard on the radio stations, which were mainly commercialized.

“The Beatles were my first real attraction to music,” he says.

It wasn’t until he reached college that Batista discovered the hidden treasure of American music. He says he was “bitten by the folk bug” when exposed to John Hartford’s 1971 release “Steam Powered Aereo-Plain.” Since then, folk music has been one of Batista’s passions.

“It is tough for any artist to get [his] work out there,” Batista says. As a visual artist, Batista said he knows the truth of his statement firsthand.

“[These musicians] are working their tails off, and they rely on people coming out to see them [to make a living],” he says. “Some artists have gigs 250 days a year.”

As one voice of folk music in the area, Batista described his job as “let[ting] people know what’s happening so they can get out and support live music.”

“I have autonomy to play people on the air who don’t get air time on any other stations in the region,” he says. “Some people slip through the cracks, and I guess it is my job to plug those cracks up.”

“Pittsburgh has not been a hospitable place to support [folk] music,” he adds. “Judging by the turnout for folk shows, [the crowds] can be pretty sparse, but audiences are building more and more, because more folk artists are stopping in Pittsburgh.”

Batista says he thinks that Club Cafe on the South Side is probably the best venue in Pittsburgh for folk artists to play.

According to Batista, a colleague told him that, in commercial radio, songs are ranked on a scale of one through five, and the best and worst songs are thrown out. Commercial radio stations play only the mainstream songs because their commercials target that type of audience, he explained.

“I don’t listen to commercial radio [anymore] because I don’t really care,” he says. “People listen to what they know, and what they know is popular culture – it is what they grew up with. I just happen to feel [those listeners] just haven’t been enlightened yet.”

In the studio, Batista takes a swig from a large bottle of seltzer water and coughs a few times before going on the air. With his melancholy voice rambling over the names, songs, albums and record companies of the artists that he plays after each 20-minute set, Batista attempts to “enlighten” his listeners.