pplpod

Mark O'Connor was born in August 1961 to a construction worker father and a dance teacher mother who insisted he learn guitar at age five; by ten he had taught himself flamenco. Seeing Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw play Diggy Liggy Lo on The Johnny Cash Show in 1969 set off three years of begging until he got a fiddle for his eleventh birthday. In 1973, at 12, he silenced the veterans at Nashville's...

Malcolm Bell Wiseman was born in May 1925 in Crimora, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and contracted polio at six months old. The disability kept him out of farm labor, so he spent his childhood indoors with records, radio, and his mother's composition notebooks, in which she transcribed the songs she heard on air. That forced stillness gave him an encyclopedic knowledge of mountain music that...

Lester Raymond Flatt was born in 1914 in Overton County, Tennessee, to Nannie Mae Haney and Isaac Columbus Flatt, and raised in the tiny community of Duncan's Chapel. His professional breakthrough came in 1943 playing mandolin and singing tenor with Charlie Monroe's Kentucky Partners, but in 1945 he joined Charlie's younger brother Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys on guitar, where his warm lead voice...

Larry Sparks was born in September 1947 in Lebanon, Ohio, to a family with roots in Jackson County, Kentucky, part of the mid-century Appalachian migration that carried mountain music into the industrial North. He grew up on Grand Ole Opry broadcasts and WCKY radio, absorbing the Stanley Brothers, Wayne Raney, and broadcaster Paul Moon Mullins, but spent his teenage years playing electric guitar i...

John Lomax was born in Mississippi in the late 1860s and carried by ox cart to a river-bottom farm in rural Texas, where he heard cowboys sing on the cattle trails and formed a life-changing friendship with Nat Blythe, a formerly enslaved farmhand who taught him folk songs and the juba dance in exchange for reading lessons. Lomax sold his favorite pony to fund college, arrived at the University of...

John Hartford was born in 1937 as John Harford in New York City, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and was working on Mississippi riverboats by age 16 while teaching himself banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin after hearing Earl Scruggs on Grand Ole Opry broadcasts. He finished a commercial arts degree at Washington University in 1960, moved to Nashville in 1965, signed with RCA Victor, and on his s...

John Duffey was born in Washington, D.C., in 1934, graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, and grew up with a father who sang at the Metropolitan Opera, about as far from a Kentucky porch as a bluegrass pioneer could start. He did not pick up a guitar until he was 17, nudged by a neighbor, yet that late start left him without the ideological baggage of players raised inside th...

Jimmy Martin was born in 1927 in Sneedville, Tennessee, and raised in a grueling farming community where his mother and stepfather sang gospel in church. In the winter of 1949, hearing that Mac Wiseman had left Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, he rode a bus to Nashville, slipped backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, and started playing in the hallway until banjo player Rudy Lyle marched him over to Monro...

Jim McReynolds, born in 1927, and Jesse McReynolds, born in 1929, were raised in Carfax, a small community near Coeburn, Virginia, in a house where their grandfather Charles McReynolds had led the Bull Mountain Moonshiners and recorded at the 1927 Bristol Sessions, the so-called big bang of country music. Jim sang a clear, soaring high tenor and held down rhythm guitar, while Jesse invented two ma...

Jim Eanes, born Homer Robert Eanes Jr. on December 6, 1923, in Mountain Valley, Virginia, grew up in a Portuguese Sephardic Jewish family in the Martinsville area and suffered a severe left-hand injury early in life. Unable to execute the fast fretting runs that get guitar players noticed, he poured everything into his right hand and became a rhythm machine, a skill that carried him from his fathe...

The Doors, Chuck Berry, the Grateful Dead and traditional Appalachian bluegrass have exactly one thing in common: mandolinist Jesse McReynolds. Born in 1929 in Coeburn, Virginia, he and his brother Jim were performing as the McReynolds Brothers by 1947, cut gospel sides as the Virginia Trio in 1951, and in 1952 signed with Capitol Records, which rebranded them Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys j...

You have heard Jerry Douglas backing Ray Charles, Paul Simon, Phish and Dolly Parton across more than 1,600 albums, even if you have never heard his name. This episode explains what a resonator guitar is, why the dobro's metal cones were invented before amplifiers existed, how the steel bar gliding across the strings creates a weeping vocal quality, and how a kid born in 1956 in Warren, Ohio, part...

Born in 1898 near Weaverville, North Carolina, J.E. Mainer gave up the banjo so his brother Wade could have it, took up the fiddle instead, and rode that compromise through textile mills in Knoxville and Concord, laxative-sponsored radio, the chaotic gig economy of the 1930s, and a late-life recording marathon. Between ages 69 and 72 he cut hundreds of tracks for Rural Rhythm Records, building an...

In 1885, riverboat and saloon tycoon Thomas Ryman stormed a tent revival to heckle preacher Samuel Porter Jones and walked out a convert. He spent seven years and about $100,000 building the Union Gospel Tabernacle, refused to put his name on it, and only after his 1904 funeral did mourners vote to rename it the Ryman Auditorium. This episode treats the building as a character with a biography, fr...

The viral cup song from Pitch Perfect traces back to When I'm Gone, recorded nearly a century earlier by three relatives from rural Virginia. This episode follows A.P. Carter, his wife Sara and his sister-in-law Maybelle from Maces Spring to Bristol, Tennessee on August 1, 1927, where Ralph Peer recorded them in an empty hat company warehouse for $50 a song plus a half-cent royalty. By the end of...

In 1945, Arthur Smith struck steel strings with a stiff piece of tortoiseshell and recorded Guitar Boogie, accidentally laying groundwork for rock and roll. This episode tracks the evolution of flatpicking, the technique of playing melody on a flat-top acoustic guitar with a single plectrum, from its origins as a rhythm workaround in 1920s Appalachian string bands to today's arena stages. It expla...

In 1925, 77-year-old Uncle Jimmy Thompson played fiddle on the fifth floor of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company building in Nashville, launching what became the longest running radio broadcast in American history. This episode treats the Grand Ole Opry as a communal campfire and traces how George D. Hay, the self-styled solemn old judge, curated DeFord Bailey, Uncle Dave Macon and t...

The commercial country music industry did not begin in a boardroom. It began with a 50-something cotton mill foreman playing an Irish family fiddle on the streets of Atlanta after a 1914 labor strike at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill left him without a paycheck. Fiddlin' John Carson, born in 1868 in Fannin County, Georgia, turned busking into a business by writing musical tabloids about local scan...

A cocky bet that he could catch a baseball bare-handed left Charlie Poole with a shattered thumb that healed into a permanent claw-like arch. That injury made the standard clawhammer banjo technique impossible, so the North Carolina textile mill worker developed a three-finger picking style that let his thumb drive a bass line while his index and middle fingers picked out melody. He funded a profe...

The word dobro means good in Slovak, but it also stands for the Dopyera Brothers, a family name stamped onto one of the most distinctive instruments in American music. This episode explores how John Dopyera, a Slovak immigrant and instrument repairman, set out to solve a 1920s physics problem: acoustic guitars were being drowned out by horn sections in dance bands before electric amplifiers existe...

Vassar Clements recorded with the Grateful Dead, played the Beverly Hillbillies theme, jammed with Paul McCartney and ended up on a Monkees track by hanging around a studio, yet he never learned to read a note of music. This episode follows the self-taught Florida kid who chose the fretless fiddle over the guitar because it was harder, learned melodies note by note from the Grand Ole Opry on the r...

On May 1, 1868, Tom Dula stood on the gallows and swore he never harmed Laura Foster, then let them hang him anyway. Most people know him as Tom Dooley from the Kingston Trio's 1958 hit, but the real story is a post-Civil War tragedy in Wilkes County, North Carolina involving a Confederate veteran, three cousins named Anne Foster Melton, Laura Foster and Pauline Foster, a pregnancy, a shallow grav...

Tim O'Brien was born left-handed but taught himself to play guitar, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, bouzouki and mandocello right-handed, a feat of adaptation that mirrors how he rewired his entire career. This episode follows the Wheeling, West Virginia native from the Bob Dylan record his sister Molly played him at age 12, through dropping out of Colby College in 1973 with 200 songs memorized as his st...

When a band loses its star frontman, conventional wisdom says the story ends. The SteelDrivers flipped that script. Formed in Nashville in 2005 with Chris Stapleton on lead vocals, the band charted a self-titled debut on Rounder Records, earned Grammy nominations and platinum singles like If It Hadn't Been for Love, then watched Stapleton walk away in April 2010 at the peak of their momentum. Foun...

The Grascals formed in Nashville in February 2004 and, within months, had Dolly Parton singing on their cover of Viva Las Vegas and hiring them as her opening act and backing band. What looked like an overnight success was actually decades of interconnected musicianship coming together: Terry Smith had anchored bands for Jimmy Martin and the Osborne Brothers, Danny Roberts had spent 20 years with...