Camp’s Tokens Show to launch new series on Nashville Public Radio Dec. 6
Camp turns love of music, theology into program that continues to expand its reach.
Office of Public Relations & Communications |
Tokens Show was developed more than a decade ago by Lipscomb professor Lee Camp. Photo by Eric Brown.
When Lee Camp, professor in the College of Bible & Ministry, gave life to the Tokens Show more than 12 years ago, it premiered in Lipscomb University’s Shamblin Theatre and become beloved by audiences ever since.
Camp is celebrating a significant milestone for his radio-style variety show as Tokens begins a new partnership with Nashville Public Radio WPLN 90.3, which will air the show every Sunday at 2 p.m. CST beginning on Dec. 6.
“We’re immensely excited about the partnership with WPLN. They’ve helped us conceive what can become a new nationally syndicated radio broadcast originating in Nashville, and become a part of the great tradition of Music City’s cultural contributions,” says Camp, who has been on faculty at Lipscomb for more than 20 years. “It seems the time is right, given that one of the elements of diversity missing from public radio is that of southern voices.”
Tokens Host Lee Camp
Guests of the first three radio episodes include Country Music Hall of Famer Vince Gill; MacArthur Genius Grant Recipient Jerry Mitchell; Vanderbilt University Professor Amy-Jill Levine; Yale University Professor Willie-James Jennings; Emmy award winning actor Hal Holbrook; beloved Nashville performer Odessa Settles, and more.
“For years, Lee C. Camp and the Tokens Show have wowed Nashville audiences with thought-provoking conversations intertwined with music that matters,” says Anita Bugg, vice president of programming at WPLN. “Nashville Public Radio relishes the opportunity to bring this combination to our air.”
READ MORE: Bible professor creates old fashioned, radio-style variety show exploring God's work
Camp hosts the show, which arose out of his work as an academic. “Early in my teaching career, I’d do these lectures on war and peace or social justice or poverty,” he remembers, “and my students would say, ‘hey, have you ever heard this Bob Dylan song, or this Woodie Guthrie song, or this Switchfoot song?’ I saw the connections they would draw to the pressing issues of our day with the singer-songwriter greats.”
His lifelong passion for music fueled his interest in live performances. “I had always loved music, played in a high school band,” says Camp. “Then a family friend invited me to drive up to Nashville from my home in Alabama to watch a CMA Awards Show at the Opry House. I think the fascination with live stage shows began then.” Subsequently Camp also became a fan of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” public radio broadcast.
While Camp pursued a Ph.D. in ethics at the University of Notre Dame, he grew increasingly moved by the power of the arts. “I remember going to the basilica at Notre Dame around Easter and hearing one of Haydn’s pieces,” he recalls. “It was as if a new world opened up to me. The best of the arts is always concerned with things that really matter, and are trying to get at all the great questions the philosophers and theologians have grappled with.”
In time, Tokens Show was conceived. Camp describes it as “part theology lecture, part cultural analysis, part old-time radio show, part conversation and part good music.”
READ MORE: Camp's Tokens Show returns to famed Ryman stage for Thanksgiving
With help from the likes of Randy Goodman, now chairman and CEO of Sony Nashville, and Doug Howard, now dean of the College of Music Business at Belmont University, the “variety show about things that matter” began in 2008.
“Lee’s idea for Tokens Show resonated with me from the start,” says Goodman. “A classic radio show rooted in the likes of the Opry or Prairie Home, yet undergirded with a philosophy or theology that is something like Thomas Merton meets Martin Luther King, Jr., and you get a genre-agnostic slate of all sorts of music and conversation that has to be experienced to get it. With Tokens now a part of WPLN’s weekly offerings, a larger assembly will get to discover this treasure.”
With a house band featuring some of Nashville’s finest — Jeff Taylor, Buddy Greene, Chris Brown, Aubrey Haynie, Byron House and Bryan Sutton — Tokens Show has hosted an immensely diverse guest list including Country Music Hall of Famers Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs, U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and Irish Poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, New York Times columnist David Brooks, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Jerry Mitchell, or musicians such as Drew Holcomb, Keb’Mo, Mary Gauthier, and JohnnySwim.
For more information, visit www.TokensShow.com.
Traditionally, Tokens holds a live performance in Nashville's Ryman Auditorium at Thanksgiving every year.