Thomas Hampson is one of America’s leading baritones, a protégé of Leonard Bernstein, and a longtime champion of American folk songs and classic songs. He is the founder of the Hampsong Foundation dedicated to the promotion of art song in America. He brings his wide experience with this music to a series of 13 radio programs called “Song of America," which can be heard Sunday evenings at 8 p.m., starting October 9 on witf 89.5 and 93.3.

The recordings that will be heard in the “Song of America” series feature some of the most prominent American singers of the past 100 years, including Marian Anderson, Nelson Eddy, Paul Robeson, William Warfield, Leontyne Price, Marilyn Horne, and Renée Fleming – as well as material drawn from Thomas Hampson’s own far-ranging catalog.

The selections include settings by American composers from Francis Hopkinson (who wrote the first home-grown American song in 1759), Stephen Foster, from lesser-known composers like Charles Griffes, Amy Marcy Beach, Walter Damrosch, and Margaret Bonds, to 20th-century masters such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein.

The programs also showcase poets whose work these composers found irresistible, including American icons like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes.

Each hour-long program focuses on a different theme related to American songs. “The ‘Song of America’ project has been a dream come true for me,” says Hampson, “These songs – our songs – say everything, through the eyes of our poets and the ears of our composers, about the culture we call American.”