Diana Shonk recently celebrated her 20th year as publisher of the Blues Audience Newsletter. With a blues party at the Bull Run in Shirley, Massachusetts and an award presented to her at HeatherFest in Norton, Massachusetts last September, Shonk has been receiving many recognitions for her longevity in the difficult businesses of publishing and music journalism.
When asked how it feels to still be publishing after 20 years, Shonk laughed and said “Old, very old.” Then, she moved onto a serious note. “I thrilled. I’m freaking thrilled. I can’t believe I’m still doing it. I love my little newsletter, and I couldn’t be happier. But, if you want something intelligent I could say ‘It feels rewarding.’ Oh God, how weird. Do people want to read that? They’ll throw up.”
Shonk, who used to go out every weekend to see blues bands, was genuinely humble when asked about winning HeatherFest’s first annual Keeping The Blues Alive award, presented to her by perennial HeatherFest volunteer Nancy Weston. “That was a thrill,” she exclaimed. “I was completely shocked and absolutely flattered. There’s a picture of me on YouTube or some place where I’m standing in the background when I realized what they were doing, and I was holding my hand over my mouth because I thought I was going to cry.”
Shonk, who has rubbed shoulders with the likes of Otis Rush, Little Milton, Pinetop Perkins, Albert Collins, and many others, freely admits that she never thought her newsletter would last this long. Her ambitious plan, in her younger days, was to build it up over a five year period then sell it. “Yeah, that happened,” she said with mock sarcasm. “Nobody else wants to do this. It’s much too hard work.” She is pleased, too, that she has known musicians like Duke Robillard and Sugar Ray Norcia all of her adult life.
She supported her Blues Audience Newsletter for the first five years of its existence with her Across The Board Graphic Design business. “It was not paying for itself in any way the first five years. I also had like 2,000 people on the mailing list, and it was costing me a fortune to do it. Because it was back when printing was printing, and there was no internet. I started it in ‘91, and I think the internet probably just started up.”
Whenever Shonk tried to sell copies in clubs, people would gruffly say that they could get all that stuff on the internet. “Id go, ‘Oh nice. Thanks. Why don’t you just slap me in the face?’” She was mailing BAN to the mailing lists of the bands who were advertising with her.
These day, Shonk is down to about 350 subscribers. Yet, she still finds it rewarding. “I’m flattered by the fact that people like it,” she said. “They tell me they like it when they re-subscribe. I have a huge file full of thank you letters. It makes you feel like you’re doing something for somebody.”
Shonk’s Blues Audience Newsletter has helped blues festivals grow, and she’s gotten the word out on a lot of different things over the years. As a result, people are very kind to her. These days, those festivals she’s promoted have allowed her to bring her BAN booth for free, which is the only way she could afford to do it.
Strategically, Shonk features more articles during the winter months when people aren’t going out as much. She is currently working on an article about Honeyboy for her next issue. That article typically would not run in Shonk’s summer issue because those issues are packed with blues events for people to go to.
“It’s my baby,” she said. “I’ve nurtured and grown this newsletter for 20 years, and I can’t believe it’s 20 years old. Now that the economy has tanked, she works alone. She used to have part time people working with her. The other challenge is keeping up with all the information that comes her way. After her first 12 years, Shonk had to switch from a monthly schedule to publishing her newsletter every other month. Hip replacement surgery left her unable to go upstairs to get to her office for a whole month. People have always given her guff for combining December and January into one issue.
“I think it’s better to go through December and January together,” she said. “That’s a very dark time of the year. People are worried about Christmas. They’re not really going out as much. That’s a good time for a short succinct schedule.” Her upcoming December/January article is going to have articles about her 20th anniversary party, the White Mountain Boogie And Blues Festival, and her annual Reader’s Poll Awards.
Shonk’s newsletter can be marred with typos. She freely admits she was never trained as a writer. “I obviously have a typographical error type of gene,” she quipped. “Every issue has problems. But in this business, you just have to say, ‘OK. There’s a typo. We’ll all live through it.’ I used to freak out. But, I don’t freak out any more. Maybe next issue there won’t be as many typos.”
Shonk cannot name the number of CDs she owns because she has too many to count, having piles all over her office. She receives them for her newsletter, for her 15 year old Keene radio show, and she’s a nominator for the Blues Music Awards in Memphis. She receives several box loads of CDs each year to do her nominating job. Shonk laments that the award show, the biggest show in blues, never gets any press. She questions why the Blues Music Awards does not get a television broadcast like the Country Music Awards. “I do not understand that personally,” she said. “It’s because they can’t make enough money off of it, and it just sucks. I wish we’d get a little more respect in this music. And if we had a Blues Music Award that was on TV and we had a few performances on TV, there would be a lot more people that would love this music.”
If it was just the money, Shonk would probably not be doing it. She finds satisfaction in helping New England blues artists and fans find each other. “It’s for the love of the form,” she said. “When I go and see a live band, I feel better. I love it. I feel great. I’m happy. They got the wrong the name for this music. It’s not the blues. It is the sunshine. I don’t know. They say they call it the blues because it helps to cure the blues. But, it gives the rest of the world the wrong impression. Because they all say, ‘I’m not going to listen to some blues band.’ Why don’t you try it before you poo poo it?”
Shonk is always happy to see young people take an interest in blues, especially her young writer Nick Tsui who pens some articles for her newsletter. “He’s a nice kid and he really has sincere interest in it and has been getting his guitar signed all over the world,” she said.
“When I see kids at clubs, I can’t believe it. I go up to them and I say, ‘Hi, you like this music?’ Usually, the young people that are in the clubs turn out to be musicians. They’re interested, and they want to play. That kind of stuff. I’m always trying to make it hip and fun enough to keep young people interested too. It’s up to the musicians, really.”
Shonk initially created her Blues Audience Newsletter as a student project at Massachusetts College Of Art. It was her proposal for her senior year. She also got an art director job for publishing company Wayne Green in Peterborough, New Hampshire where she got much more of a hands on education. The production manager Ray Self took her under his wing and taught her many of the skills she uses today. Combining her senior project with her hands on experience, she created the Blues Audience Newsletter.
Her first issue featured her brother’s band Loaded Dice, The Rynborn, The Movers, and Roomful Of Blues. Shonk essentially put into one publication the info each band and establishment were sending out to their fan base on a postcard to increase audience size. She also mailed her new newsletter to each’s mailing list, charging them what they would pay to send out their own mailings. She told each band and establishment that they would “get the added advantage of everybody else’s enthusiastic people that like blues.”
Roomful Of Blues still advertises their monthly schedules with Blues Audience Newsletter and Shonk said they probably understand better than any band of how important it is to have fans know where you are playing. “I did start out sending out to their mailing list, which is a huge list,” she said. These days, Shonk can make the newsletter available to people on the internet with a PDF.
Before the newsletter Shonk sang and played rhythm guitar for a country-blues band called Diana Shonk And The Rogues. They played country rooms like Jimmy’s Seafood in Concord, New Hampshire. Shonk and her band also hosted a weekly jam at The Rynborn in Antrim, New Hampshire for over a year, before she started the newsletter. Her band entered a New England country music contest with an original song. “The guy who wrote the song, I think, smoked too much pot,” Shonk said, “and he had a very bad memory. So, he’d write these songs, and he’d need to have a music stand and have the words on the music stand. While he was singing, they must have blown off and fell on the floor in front of him, and he couldn’t see them. So, he leaned over, knocked over his mic stand and I think the music stand and he almost fell off the stage, and that was the end of us. It was really funny. I was wetting my pants. Me and the bass player looked at each other and went, ‘Thank God that wasn’t one of us. He would have literally killed us.”
The Rynborn once cancelled her Wednesday night jam gig to feature harmonica player William Clark and she complimented him for bringing in a full house, which never happened for her jam. Clark was gracious: “Now, wait a minute,” he said, “I’m the big shot from LA but you come to LA, and you’re the big shot from out of town, and you’ll get plenty of people into listen to you.’ I thought to myself I could just kiss him for saying that. It was so nice.”
Shonk’s brother Peter Shonk is a life long musician and the two close siblings discovered the blues together. They were listening to John Mayall as kids and the first blues recording Shonk ever found was a cassette tape called Forever Blues. “It had Little Walter’s tune ‘Juke’ on it, and that was it for me. I was a goner,” she recounted.
Shonk also loves jazz as wells as blues, finding they both require intellectual concentration and an open mind. “You have to be able to listen and get it,” she said. “Blues is like jazz’s older brother, and I have been involved in both as a listener since I was a young kid. We didn’t really have a lot of TV as a kid. My mother listened to show tunes like West Side Story, really gutsy cool music in the house. We always sang together. I’ve been singing my whole life. That’s something that makes me really happy. Singing in a band is a rush like you wouldn’t believe. I think that’s why musicians stick with it, cause it’s such a thrill. It’s like going on a rollercoaster.”
Shonk went on to say that music can start a revolution and change the world. “Look at The Beatles, the way they changed the world with their music. It was amazing. I think that humans really respond to music on a very deep emotional level. I think it’s the one thing that humans do that is really altruistic. It makes people happy, and you don’t want to take that away from them. You want to give them that.”
OK, I read it, I would have corrected a few phases for grammar, but it’s pretty good for a guy.
I’ve been a Blues Audience subscriber for ten years or more, after seeing it at different Blues clubs back in it’s early days, where you could pick up a free copy. At first, the misspellings and odd grammar used to bug me, since I was an English major. But after all this time, I’ve come to embrace those little quirks as Diana’s personal touch… and I love it! Congratulations on 20 years of publishing the newsletter, Diana. You’re doing a great service for the New England Blues community. Hope to see you someplace soon.
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