Barry Hazle, Shasta Serenade Set to Retire

Music host Barry Hazle and his Saturday afternoon show The Shasta Serenade will retire from NSPR’s airwaves on Jan. 28.

Hazle has produced the two-hour Americana program since 2010 and has worked as an NSPR volunteer since the late 1990s.

“There's no doubt in my mind that I will miss it,” Hazle said. “But at the same time you go, ‘Wait a minute—how much energy are you going to put into this thing?’ You gotta realize, I'm going to be 70 years old this coming year. I want to do something different.”

Hazle first started at NSPR as a part-time volunteer host for the long-running Good Old Fashioned Folk Music Show. Show cofounder and former NSPR News Director Lorraine Dechter, a friend of Hazle’s, thought he had a good radio voice and brought him into the studio.

“She kind of went through a few things, and then all of a sudden, I remember it very clearly, about the third time I was there, she walked away,” Hazle recalls. “You just had to do it. And that's what I did—I did it.”

He soon began producing that show full time, and then eventually was offered the opportunity to develop his own program. The Shasta Serenade, which borrowed its name from a bluegrass festival Hazle formerly produced in Shasta County, aired from noon to 2 p.m. and featured an eclectic mix of Americana, blues, rockabilly, folk, bluegrass, and timeless standards that met a simple criterion: the host enjoyed it.

“I don't put any genre limitations on it, nothing,” he said. “It's just pure, ‘Do I like this and do I think somebody else will like it?’ And most of the time, when I like something, it's because it's good music and it's easy to like.”

Before moving to the North State, Hazle worked for the City of Sunnyvale’s Department of Public Safety, but music has long been a passion of his, beginning with his first purchase at age 10 of a 45 record by Elvis Presley, an enduring favorite. Other all-time greats you’d often hear him play on the show include Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Booker T. Jones. He also greatly respects the likes of John Prine, John McCutcheon, and Mandolin Orange, among many others.

His love of music found an additional outlet once he moved to the North State in the mid-'90s in the form of a nonprofit organization, The Oak Song Society for the Preservation of Way Cool Music, which he launched with his wife and their friends in Shasta County.

“There were very few organizations that were producing the kind of music that we were bringing in,” Hazle said. “We were bringing in cowboy music—I mean high-class cowboy acts—Don Edwards and people like that.”

The society produced concerts for a time in the picturesque setting of a raised stage in the mountains of Oak Run before the Recession hit and they saw a significant decline in audience share. They then moved the concerts to town, putting on dozens of shows at Bernie’s Guitar in Redding.

Now the nonprofit puts on about 10 concerts a year, and that’s work Hazle plans to continue, along with his crew member duties at the biannual Strawberry Musical Festival, which he says for his family is “like going home.”

Retiring from Shasta Serenade will also allow him and his wife to take more trips, spend more time with their grandchildren, and enjoy hobbies including genealogy and antiquing.

“I'm very loyal to KCHO and KFPR—now NSPR,” he says. “I will miss it—there's no doubt about it. But I will fight the urge to come back.”

You can find archived episodes of The Shasta Serenade on the show's program page as well as by searching "Shasta Serenade" in the iTunes Store.