(Listen to this interview here.) 

Modesty is a rare commodity in the world of rock and roll, but Delbert McClinton thinks it's an essential element of writing a good song.

"Being a songwriter, you have to know humility, and embrace it," he said in an interview last week. "In songwriting, there's what we around here call good stupid and bad stupid."

WVIK 90.3 FM will present the program Quad City Oral Histories throughout July, giving audiences an opportunity to hear Quad Citians relate their experiences (both at home and abroad) during World War II. The program will air at 7 p.m. on Mondays. The project was a collaboration between WVIK and the Davenport Public Library's Richardson-Sloane Special Collections Center. According to a press release: "Now in their 70s and 80s, these local citizens were chemists on the Manhattan Project, brides from England, farm boys on ‘scrap drives,' MedEvac nurses, and ‘Rosie-the-Riveters.' They were at Pearl Harbor and survived ‘D-Day.' One man shot the padlock on the gates of Dachau, and several liberated labor camps across Europe."

Johanne Jakhelln has worked with unorthodox spaces before. As the artistic director for Ballet Quad Cities, Jakhelln, for example, has had to deal with the choir step on the stage at Augustana College's Centennial Hall. "You have to be creative to integrate that into what you're doing," she said.

So the Mississippi River is no big thing. For this Saturday's one-hour performance One River Mississippi, Jakhelln merely needs to choreograph and coordinate more than 60 volunteer performers at seven sites along the river from the Centennial Bridge to the roller dam at Locks & Dam 15. She will just work with dancers, water skiers, boaters, and a Native American medicine woman. And it only needs to be coordinated with six other river sites - Itasca, Minnesota; Minneapolis; St. Louis; Memphis; New Orleans; and Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana - and set to music.

No big deal. Just like at Centennial Hall.

When last we heard from state Senator James Meeks, he had dropped out of the governor's race and endorsed Governor Rod Blagojevich's much hyped education/lottery plan. With the proposal currently under fire from almost all corners, I thought it might be a good time to check back in with him.