pplpod

In 1940s Detroit, a 16-year-old girl slipped out into the freezing night clutching a forged birth certificate so she could enter amateur singing contests in jazz clubs. Born Lillie Mae Jones in Flint in 1929, Betty Carter grew up in an emotionally distant home where her father was a church musical director, and she later described her childhood as a lonesome trek with no cheering section. This epi...

Beneath the banks, chain pharmacies, and office towers of Midtown Manhattan lies the graveyard of a cultural revolution. This episode takes a walking tour of 52nd Street, a 1.9-mile stretch running from the West Side Highway to a dead-end bluff over the FDR Drive, and explains how the end of Prohibition in 1933 shifted New York's jazz epicenter from Harlem to a row of converted brownstone basement...

The HBO film For Love or Country stars Andy Garcia as a Cuban musician pulling off a daring Cold War defection, and the dramatic score was written by the film's own subject, Arturo Sandoval. This episode follows Sandoval from a village called Artemisa in the province of Havana, where he was born into poverty in 1949 and started on percussion in the local band at 13, through three years of rigorous...

In 1939, earning up to $60,000 a week in Depression-era money, Artie Shaw stopped playing in the middle of a live radio broadcast at the Cafe Rouge in New York, walked off the bandstand, and fled to Mexico. This episode explores the psychology of Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, a deeply introverted kid raised in New Haven who faced anti-Semitism, saved grocery-store wages to buy his first saxophone, left...

Picture a European concert hall in 1969 where the stage floor is covered by roughly 500 instruments, from saxophones and trumpets to bicycle horns, wind chimes, and birthday-party noisemakers, and the musicians walk out in theatrical costumes and face paint. This episode tells the story of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, from its roots in the AACM cooperative on Chicago's South Side and the 1966 Rosc...

In December 1964 a 27-year-old saxophonist was invited to play on alternate takes of the opening movement of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, only to have his parts left off the final record until a 2002 reissue. For Archie Shepp, that near miss was barely a footnote. This episode traces his path from Fort Lauderdale and Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood, where he learned banjo from his father...

In the late summer of 1967, a delivery truck pulled up to a suburban home where a newly widowed mother of four was living, and workers unloaded a massive Lyon and Healy concert harp. John Coltrane had ordered it for his wife before his death at age 40 on July 17, 1967. This episode follows Alice Coltrane, born Alice McLeod in Detroit in 1937, from a gospel-soaked family home to Paris, where she st...

In the mid-1950s a rising singer appeared in the Hollywood musical The Girl Can't Help It wearing the same orange dress Marilyn Monroe wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, then took a match to it. That singer was Anna Marie Wooldridge, better known as Abbey Lincoln. This episode traces her journey from rural Calvin Center, Michigan, the tenth of twelve children, through stage names like Gabby Lee and...

Yonder Mountain String Band began with a mandolin player who could not play the mandolin. In Urbana, Illinois, banjo player Dave Johnston recruited Jeff Austin into the Bluegrass Holes and told him to play fast and loud. This episode follows both musicians west to Boulder and Nederland, Colorado, where they met bassist Ben Kaufman and guitarist Adam Aijala at a club called the Verve and formed the...

In 2011 the Carolina Chocolate Drops accepted a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album with a sound built on banjo, fiddle, a clay jug, a kazoo, and animal bones. This episode traces how Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson met at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, in April 2005, formed Sankofa Strings, narrowed their focus to the blues- and ragtime-inflected Piedmon...

Wilma Lee Cooper suffered a stroke on stage at the Ryman Auditorium in February 2001, was told she would never walk again, and then walked back onto the Grand Ole Opry stage to thank her audience. This episode traces the life of the singer the Smithsonian Institution named the First Lady of Bluegrass in 1974, from her 1921 birth in Valley Head, West Virginia, to a coal miner and a schoolteacher, t...

When BioShock Infinite players heard a choir sing Will the Circle Be Unbroken without the word Lord, many accused the developers of censorship. In fact, the game's 1912 setting used the original 1907 lyrics, and most listeners had never heard them. This episode traces the century-long evolution of the song, from its publication in Chicago by Charles M. Alexander with music by Charles H. Gabriel an...

The Kentucky Colonels posted the best regular-season record in ABA history, drafted future Hall of Famers, ran a ten-woman board of directors, won the 1975 championship, and beat the reigning NBA champion Golden State Warriors in an exhibition game. Then the franchise ceased to exist. This episode follows the Colonels from their 1967 founding in Louisville, complete with chartreuse uniforms, lower...

In April 1999, a Los Angeles family attended a local bluegrass festival and decided on the ride home to start a band, even though the four kids did not play their instruments. Three months later they booked their first paying gig at a theme park in Oakland. This episode traces the improbable rise of Cherryholmes, from selling the family home in 2002 to tour in a 26-foot travel trailer, to a Grand...

The most collected and widely sung English song in history is a grim tale about a tavern insult, a cold rejection at a deathbed, and a double funeral where a rose and a briar twine into a true lovers' knot. This episode asks why Barbara Allen outlasted anthems, hymns, and lullabies, starting with the folklorists' view that its stripped-down plot needed none of the milk-white steeds and magic of ot...

Sonny Osborne bolted a padlock onto the resonator of his banjo to keep rivals and angry traditionalists from seeing the electronics inside. This episode explains how a prodigy born in Thousand Sticks, Kentucky, in 1937, who was playing the Grand Ole Opry with Bill Monroe at 14, grew into the most controversial innovator in bluegrass alongside his brother Bobby. We follow the Osborne Brothers from...

Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz formed Mandolin Orange in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 2009 and built a career on acoustic restraint: mandolin, fiddle, guitar, banjo, and two closely harmonized voices. This episode follows their self-released albums Quiet Little Room and Haste Make / Hard Hearted Stranger, the 2013 signing with Yep Roc Records, and a relentless run through Telluride, Newport, Me...

Adam Steffey holds the all-time record with 11 Mandolin Player of the Year awards and five Grammys, yet on November 15, 2018, as the Highland Travelers disbanded, he announced he was leaving music for another profession. By January 2019 he was back, joining Volume Five. This episode works backward from that reversal to understand a musician who did not touch a mandolin until age 15. Born in Norfol...

In 1990 the International Bluegrass Music Association created its Entertainer of the Year award and gave the first one to Hot Rize, and that same year the band disbanded. This episode explores why a Colorado quartet walked away at its summit, beginning with the January 18, 1978, debut, the departure of guitarist Mike Scap three months later, and the reshuffle that put Nick Forster on electric bass...

Accepting the 2018 Americana Music Honors award for Emerging Artist of the Year, Tyler Childers used the microphone to declare himself a country singer and call the Americana label a costume and a purgatory. This episode unpacks the conviction behind that moment, starting in Lawrence County, Kentucky, where he was born in 1991 to a coal industry father and a nurse mother, endured surgeries for clu...

On a freezing morning in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2003, Dave Simonett found his van and every piece of electric gear inside it gone. The only instrument left was an acoustic guitar in his apartment. This episode traces how that theft accidentally created Trampled by Turtles, a band that recruited acoustic newcomers, including speed metal drummer Ryan Young on fiddle, and played string instruments wit...

A teenager in Syracuse, New York, heard the Kingston Trio's Charlie on the MTA in 1963 and latched onto the banjo. This episode follows Tony Trischka from the Down City Ramblers and his 1971 recording debut with Country Cooking into Breakfast Special, a New York band that mixed bluegrass with avant-garde, psychedelic rock, jazz, and klezmer in irreverent, sometimes absurdist shows. Drawing on ethn...

In 1960 a nine-year-old in California was handed Clarence White's modified 1935 Martin D-28, its sound hole enlarged with a blade, and fifteen years later he tracked down and bought that exact guitar. This episode tells the story of David Anthony Rice, born in Danville, Virginia, in 1951, raised in a nomadic musical family that landed in Los Angeles, and shaped by White's syncopation and cross-pic...

William August Marburg was born in 1931 into a Maryland tobacco fortune, raised on a farm in Riderwood, and educated at elite private schools. He discovered country music on the radio, was singing and playing guitar by 12, and at the University of Virginia in 1949 formed the Dixie Mountain Boys with Paul Clayton and Dave Sadler. Because his family considered hillbilly music a scandal, he adopted t...

Type Mike Compton into Wikipedia and you land on a disambiguation page listing three men born in 1944, 1956, and 1970: a Philadelphia Phillies catcher, an American bluegrass mandolin player, and a National Football League guard. This episode uses that single, sparse page as a springboard to explore three distinct American arenas and the unseen labor behind each bullet point. We look at the catcher...