WITF Music: Zachariah King

Making Pennsylvania music and remembering music made in Pennsylvania.

• Joe Ulrich/WITF
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Joe has been interested in audio and music since he was a kid. What started as a fascination with his parents’ vinyl records and cassette tapes turned into a love of both performing and recording. He grew up in Elizabethtown, Pa. and moved to Pittsburgh in 1999 where he majored in Photography at the University of Pittsburgh.
  
  In 2004, he attended the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences in Tempe, AZ. He returned to Pittsburgh to work at a recording studio.
  
  In 2008, Joe arrived at WITF, where his skills have found a good home as an on-air host, audio engineer and producer of WITF Music. In 2016, Joe earned a National Edward R. Murrow award for Best Use of Sound.

 Joe Ulrich / WITF

Zachariah King performs at WITF Music January 22, 2025. (Joe Ulrich - WITF)

Listen to the radio feature:

Joe Ulrich: Just to start, just tell me where you’re from.

Zachariah King: I’m from Eshcol, Pennsylvania. If you’re familiar with the Perry County area, it’s just outside of Ickesburg. I grew up right across the street from the Eschol church.

Joe Ulrich: How did you get started in music?

Zachariah King: I had a neighbor who went to the church. His name was Roscoe Reisinger and he was an old time bluegrass picker and hell-raiser. He would have me down at his house. They’d have little jams and such, and I would just get out and that got me excited to do it.

Joe Ulrich: In your bio you said you found another type of congregation later on?

Zachariah King: Yeah, that’s where I ran into Ross [Kennedy] down at Chick’s. That was the stomping grounds were live music was really happening for a long time.

Joe Ulrich: When you were playing at Chick’s, which is Laurel Run Lodge, what is it exactly that you feel like you discovered there?

Zachariah King: I’d say it was the community and the camaraderie of it all, and the patrons love music. It’s not just the musicians that are vibing with the place. They love live music, and especially original music too.

There’s very few places I’ve ever been where you could play your song a handful of times and by the third time around or whatever, everyone’s singing along. It’s got a cool feeling.

Joe Ulrich: You’ve been archiving and documenting local music. Tell me about how you got interested in doing that.

Zachariah King: This sounds redundant, but it all comes back to Chick’s and Laurel Run Lodge. Gene Knisely, who is a good friend of mine and we played a lot of music together over the years, his dad was Chick Knisely and he was a famous fiddler. He played on WHYL and WIOO radio stations in Carlisle. And recently Gene found a tape that they had pulled off a reel to reel somewhere at the old WIOO studio, which burned down in like 2010. I got to digitize it and in the process of it all, I was like, wow, there’s a lot of local stuff and a lot of it’s really cool, like cool old country music and Al Shade’s responsible for a lot of that.

Chicken Clark’s Road Apple Rodeo is another one. Gene’s dad’s band was called the Blue Mountain Ridge Runners.

I got a jukebox in my kitchen. I inherited it from my great uncle and it plays 45 records. So I have a strong addiction with buying 45 records, especially recorded in Pennsylvania.

Joe Ulrich: Do you feel like there’s an overarching theme in the music that you write?

Zachariah King: I think I used to dwell a lot on my own personal experiences. As I begin to grow as a person and as a musician, I feel like my life is still reflected in the music that I make. Just getting excited about the history stuff, it just sent me in that direction and inspired me to write songs like that, which I never had done before. All of a sudden I’m like reading books to make sure I get the facts right in the song that I am putting down.

Joe Ulrich: Was there anything else about the music or the band or anything that we didn’t talk about?

Zachariah King: No, that about sums it up. I’m just a fellow from Perry County looking to play some good music, country or what have you. And these are the fellows I’ve chosen to do it with. I’m pretty excited about that.

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