This week’s Backroads & Banjos segment is devoted to the music of little known banjo player Omer Forster. Forster was a Tennessee musician who developed his own two-finger style of picking the banjo that made for a very clean tone and great precision on the instrument.

Jon primes the listeners for Dragon*Con, Atlanta’s biggest pop culture event, by interviewing a pair of guests coming to the convention, which drops September 3-6. Actress Kelly LeBrock from the John Hughes classic “Weird Science” and actor Richard Hatch from both “Battlestar Galactica” TV shows call in on the Bat Phone. Jon also gets a call from Don Brewer, one of the co-founders of rock band Grand Funk Railroad. Brewer continues to play drums and sing in the band. And Grand Funk will be at the Villages Amphitheater in Fayetteville on August 28. Expect some Grand Funk, a little Oingo Boingo and a shot of pop culture news.

Episode 47 of Paste Magazine’s Signs of Life takes a look back at one of their most high-concept issues. Issue 47 took a look at violence in the television, music and video games and where the line between right and wrong lies. This episode features some of the best songs with themes of death and violence from artists like Johnny Cash, the Decemberists, Uncle Tupelo and more. As always, this episode starts with a flashback to the sampler CD that accompanied Paste Magazine Issue 47. This week’s flashback is “Gillian was a Horse” by Seattle artist Damien Jurado from October 2008.

David speaks with blues field recorder, George Mitchell about his experience traveling across the country, in particular the south, in search of blues artists otherwise unknown to the broader american public. George Mitchell is credited with making the first ever recordings of the Mississippi blues man R.L. Burnside. A seven CD box set of his recordings is available on Fat Possum records and is titled simply The George Mitchell Collection.