pplpod

Watch a clawhammer player's right hand and it looks stiff, almost frozen, yet a bass line, chords, and melody pour out at once. This episode breaks down the mechanics: a rigid claw shape, motion from the wrist, strikes with the back of the fingernail, and a thumb that catches a high drone string on the offbeat. Together they create the bum-ditty, a three-part cycle that turns a banjo into an entir...

Del McCoury was born in Bakersville, North Carolina, in 1939, moved to York County, Pennsylvania, as a toddler, and spent his youth trying to play banjo like Earl Scruggs. This episode follows his early years with the Stevens Brothers and Keith Daniels and the Blue Ridge Ramblers, then the 1963 phone call from Bill Monroe that changed everything: Monroe already had a banjo player, so he handed Del...

Roscoe Holcomb spent his life in coal mines, on construction sites, and on farms around Daisy, Kentucky, playing banjo, guitar, harmonica, and fiddle purely for release. This episode traces how the lined-out, unaccompanied singing of Old Regular Baptist churches collided with the Blind Lemon Jefferson records arriving by mail order, producing a piercing, unmetered vocal style that was equal parts...

James Gideon Tanner was a chicken farmer from Thomas Bridge, near Monroe, Georgia, who picked up a fiddle at 14 and built a repertoire of more than 2,000 songs in an era with no radio and no records. This episode follows his rivalry with Fiddlin' John Carson on the Georgia fiddle convention circuit, where reputations were won and lost in front of live crowds, and explains why a walking human jukeb...

The autoharp is usually dismissed as a quaint campfire instrument, but this episode digs into the surprisingly complex machine underneath. We break down how a 36-string box zither with felt-padded chord bars works like a reverse fretboard, muting everything you do not want so a strum produces a perfect chord, and why the standard tuning skips notes like G-sharp 3 to keep tension and size manageabl...

The Kingston Trio accounted for roughly 15 percent of Capitol Records' sales, outsold Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, and sparked the American folk revival while wearing matching striped shirts and avoiding politics entirely. This episode begins in a Honolulu junior high school where Dave Guard and Bob Shane learned ukulele and absorbed Hawaiian slack key guitar, follows them to Stanford and Menl...

Alison Brown was born in Hartford, Connecticut in August 1962, took up guitar at eight and banjo at ten, met fiddler Stuart Duncan at 12, and in the summer of 1978 toured festival contests with Duncan and his father, winning the Canadian National Banjo Championship and earning a night on the Grand Ole Opry at 16. Then she detoured: history and literature at Harvard, an MBA from UCLA, and two years...

In 1950 an ethnomusicologist recording the Kipsigis people in Kenya's Great Rift Valley captured a song about a mythical figure who turned out to be a Mississippi railroad worker: Jimmie Rodgers. This episode traces how a boy born in 1897, most likely in Meridian, lost his mother at six, bounced between relatives, ran away with a medicine show at 13, and got his real musical education as a water b...

Keith Whitley's headstone in Spring Hill, Tennessee carries the wrong birth year, and he remains the only person in Grand Ole Opry history recognized posthumously as a former member without having been inducted while alive. Born in Ashland, Kentucky in 1954 and raised in Sandy Hook in Elliott County, he survived two horrific car crashes as a teenager, including driving off a 120-foot cliff into a...

On October 21, 1966, Carter Stanley began hemorrhaging on stage in a packed school auditorium in Hazel Green, Kentucky, and died six weeks later of cirrhosis of the liver at 41. This episode works backward from that night to explain how a boy born August 27, 1925, at Big Spraddle Creek in Dickenson County, Virginia, took unaccompanied ballads, church hymns and old-time string band music and helped...

Frank Noah Proffitt was born in 1913 in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, and grew up from age nine in the Beaver Dam community of Watauga County, North Carolina, where music was an inheritance rather than a career. He learned ballads from his parents, aunts and uncles, and learned to build mountain banjos and Appalachian dulcimers from his father Wiley, a Civil War veteran and luthier, later using his...

David 'Stringbean' Akeman was born in 1915 in Annville, Kentucky, into a musical but severely impoverished family, and traded a pair of bantam chickens for his first banjo at age 12. This episode follows his Depression-era path through the Civilian Conservation Corps, a talent contest judged by Asa Martin, the on-stage slip that gave him his name, and the night a missing performer pushed him into...

Orange Blossom Special is often called the national anthem of fiddle players, a musical imitation of a luxury all-Pullman train that ran from New York to Miami. Its true author, Ervin T. Rouse, born in 1917 and died in 1981, lived quietly in the Florida Everglades, copyrighted the tune in 1938 and recorded it with his brother Gordon in 1939, before the train even began passenger service to Jackson...

Carter Stanley was born in 1925 and Ralph in 1927 on a family farm in Dickenson County, Virginia, where they learned by ear from Grand Ole Opry broadcasts pulled in on battery-powered radios. This episode traces the arc from their first band, the Lazy Ramblers, through World War II service, the November 1946 formation of the Clinch Mountain Boys, the WCYB Farm and Fun Time radio slot in Bristol, a...

Dan Crary, born in Kansas in 1939, picked up the guitar around age 12 but pointed his life toward theology and academia, enrolling at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago after high school in 1957, studying at the University of Kansas in 1960, and gigging at night in San Francisco while at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in 1965. This episode explains why the acoustic guitar was historica...

Sara Watkins was born June 8, 1981, in Vista, California, and by 1989 was the eight-year-old fiddler in Nickel Creek alongside her brother Sean and mandolinist Chris Thile. This episode examines what growing up inside a touring progressive bluegrass trio taught her, from technical dexterity to the harder skill of knowing when not to play, and what happened when the band's seven-year hiatus left he...

In 1971, mathematician Ben Eldridge opened his Bethesda, Maryland basement to a group of friends with demanding day jobs: instrument repairman and mandolinist John Duffey, physician and lead singer John Starling, graphic artist and dobro player Mike Auldridge, and National Geographic cartographer Tom Gray on bass. When Charlie Waller of the Country Gentlemen joked that the public would seldom see...

The banjo duel at the gas station in the 1972 film Deliverance looks flawlessly authentic, but the boy on the porch, actor Billy Redden, could not play a note. A local musician named Mike Addis crouched behind him with an arm threaded through a modified shirt sleeve to work the fretboard, while the audio came from studio musicians Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell. This episode unpacks that piece o...

Tommy Jarrell was born March 1, 1901, in the Mount Airy region of Surry County, North Carolina. He married Nina Lowe in 1923, raised three children, and spent roughly four decades operating a motor grader for the North Carolina Highway Department until retiring in 1966. Music was never his career; it was how his community socialized after work, and that insulation from the commercial industry pres...

Every third weekend of June, Planet Bluegrass hosts the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in a Colorado town park where the main stage has not moved since the 1970s. This episode rewinds to the festival's rowdy origins: a mining-town Fourth of July tradition that, after the Telluride Ski Resort opened in 1972 and the town marketed the holiday across surrounding states, collapsed into street fights and...

Ola Belle Reed was born Ola Wave Campbell on August 18, 1916, in Grassy Creek, North Carolina, the fourth of 13 children in a family where music functioned as domestic infrastructure. Her grandfather and father played fiddle, her uncle Dockery Campbell taught her clawhammer banjo, her mother and grandmother passed down traditional ballads, and her uncle Herb Osborne taught her mining songs. This e...

Buell Kazee was playing banjo in church at age five in Magoffin County, Kentucky, majored in English, Greek, and Latin at Georgetown College, and then recorded 51 tracks for Brunswick Records in New York between 1927 and 1929, including "Roll On John," "John Hardy," "The Sporting Bachelors," "Little Orphan Child," and his biggest success, "On Top of Old Smoky." This episode looks at how the electr...

Red Smiley found his calling at age seven in 1932, watching two transient guitarists on a road in Bushnell, North Carolina. Don Reno found his in 1948 by walking uninvited onto Bill Monroe's stage in Taylorsville after Earl Scruggs left, and playing well enough to be hired on the spot. This episode follows both men through World War II, Reno's single-string, jazz-inflected banjo style, the malaria...

Bobby Osborne, born 1931, and Sonny Osborne, born 1937, lost their Roark, Kentucky home to a fire, moved to Hyden and then the Dayton, Ohio area, and were split by the Korean War: Bobby into the Marine Corps, Sonny into Bill Monroe's band on banjo. Reunited, they ground through Knoxville, Detroit, Wheeling, and Dayton with Jimmy Martin, Charlie Bailey, and finally Red Allen and Art Stamper before...

David Harrison Macon ran a mule-drawn freight company between Tennessee towns for 20 years until motorized trucks put him out of business around 1920, when he was 50. Born in 1870, he had learned banjo as a teenager from circus comedian Joel Davidson at his family's Broadway Hotel in Nashville, a magnet for vaudeville performers, before his father's murder in 1886 sent the family to a stagecoach i...