Dick Pleasants has been a mainstay on radio in Boston, Massachusetts and environs for forty years and has provided support for numerous artists and folk music venues during that time. As he prepares to retire, a number of his musical friends will pay tribute to him during “A Pleasant(s) Evening at Sanders” on Friday, Jan. 7, 2011 beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Sanders Theater on Harvard University’s campus in Cambridge. Proceeds from this special celebratory event will benefit WUMB’s capital campaign. A room in the new WUMB studios and offices will be named after Pleasants.

Dick Pleasants

Currently the host of WUMB Music Mix weekdays from 3-7 p.m., Pleasants started in radio on Cape Cod after graduating from Emerson College in 1970. In addition to stints at commercial radio stations WCIB on the Cape, WATD in Marshfield and WBOS in Boston, he began working in public radio at Boston’s WGBH in 1978 and has been affiliated with WUMB for the past 15 years. Pleasants hosted The Morning Express before shifting to the afternoons. His four-hour show features a mix of contemporary and traditional folk, roots, acoustic and Americana music, sprinkled with live interviews, news and information. Through the years, Pleasants has exposed his listeners not only to folk music, but to what he calls “the threads that were winding through it” – including urban and country blues, old-time stringband music, bluegrass and newgrass, edgy country and more.

Pleasants also established and directs Summer Acoustic Music Week, a music camp for adults, on Lake Winnipesaukee in central New Hampshire, during which folks are immersed in folk music — with classes and workshops during the day and evenings filled with concerts, jam sessions, open mics and folk dancing. Produced by WUMB Radio and entering its 16th season in 2011, Summer Acoustic Music Week is slated for July 17-23 and Aug. 21-27.

“Dick Pleasants has been one of the stalwarts of folk and semi-folk since 1970 and one of the primary reasons that the Boston-Cambridge folk scene has been thriving for so long,” says Robin Batteau, a singer-songwriter, violinist and guitarist who will perform in the Jan. 7 tribute concert along with his longtime musical partner David Buskin (singer-songwriter, keyboardist and guitarist) and percussionist Marshal Rosenberg. “Without Dick Pleasants, there wouldn’t be the folk scene that there is now and has been for 40 years,” Batteau continues. “We heard he was retiring and we thought let’s acknowledge his career.” He notes that Pleasants “listened to everything and played what he loved so you really got an idea of what mattered to him.”

Echoing his musical partner’s sentiments, Buskin, reportedly the first artist whom Pleasants ever interviewed as a radio disk jockey, says: “He’s been fortunate to really make a career out of something he loves. The guy has been a champion for folkies like us. He’s always been supportive and friendly, and we’re sure going to miss him on the air.”

So, too, will the folks who book the venues in the Greater Boston area at which artists whose careers the longtime radio announcer and program host has touched perform. “Dick Pleasants is one of the most influential and knowledgeable DJs in the business,” says Kathy Sands-Boehmer, who books artists for Marblehead’s Me & Thee Coffeehouse and is vice president of the Boston Area Coffeehouse Association (BACHA): “He has added many, many bits of music trivia to my own musical education. We’ve been blessed to have him as such an integral part of the music scene here in Boston.”

In addition to Buskin & Batteau, featured performers during “A Pleasant(s) Evening at Sanders” include Jonatha Brooke, Brother Sun (Greg Greenway, Joe Jencks, Pat Wictor), Antje Duvekot, Jonathan Edwards, Patty Larkin, Lori McKenna, Ellis Paul and Tom Rush, whom Pleasants acknowledges influenced him a lot in the 60s when he saw him at Cambridge’s Club 47 and The Unicorn coffeehouse. If available, tickets, priced at $50, can be ordered by calling the Harvard Box Office at (617) 496-2222 or logging-on to www.boxoffice.harvard.edu.