Let It Roll

Host Nate Wilcox talks with Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music,” in a conversation first released in 2025 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by subject matter. This is the moment the old ballads stopped passing from grandparent to...

Host Nate Wilcox and the late Ed Ward, author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume One: 1920-1963,” close Season 3 of Let It Roll From the Beginning... with a conversation first recorded in 2018. This is the gap between the 1920s and the birth of rock and roll: how African American pop music went from the blues queens through the swing era to rhythm and blues. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO H...

Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Ted Gioia, author of “The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBST...

Gareth Murphy set out to write an obituary for the record man. A French label boss had told him over lunch that the record producer was a dying breed, and in the 2010s, with the industry shrinking every year since 1999, it looked like he was right. Then Murphy went back to the beginning, found the same collapse in the 1920s and again in the Depression, and came out the other side with the opposite...

GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Peter Doggett, author of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop Music,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 and returning now to conclude season 3 of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISOD...

The same man wrote “It’s Tight Like That” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” As Georgia Tom, Thomas A. Dorsey cut it with Tampa Red in 1928 - one of the dirtiest hits of the decade, and the record that set off the hokum craze. As Thomas A. Dorsey, he wrote the song Mahalia Jackson sang at Martin Luther King’s funeral. And the order is not the one you would guess: “It’s Tight Like That” came after...

Before OKeh would bet on records made by Black artists for Black buyers, somebody had to go and find out whether that market existed. The company sent Ralph Peer. He went into barbershops and pool halls and asked people whether they would buy records made by their own artists, and came back with the answer: yes, they will. That is Barry Mazor’s account of how Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” got made i...

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by James Porter - Chicago writer, DJ and musician - to open CountryRoll, their run through Ken Burns’s “Country Music” series, in a conversation first recorded in 2021 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order i...

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by Ed Ward, his original co-host and the author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” for a conversation first recorded in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock,” for the next installment of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being recast in chronological order by topic. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

In this episode, host Nate Wilcox welcomes Elijah Wald to discuss his controversial but informative book "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll" which actually has a lot more to say about Paul Whiteman and why white America considered him the King of Jazz in the 1920s. This episode originally dropped in 2018. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

Host Nate Wilcox tells this one alone, as a Let It Roll seance - the guest is the late Jack Palmer, author of “Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music,” who died before Nate could ever interview him. The episode returns now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning to the End, in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTAC...

Host Nate Wilcox and the late Ed Ward, the rock historian of NPR’s Fresh Air kicked off their discussions of Ed’s History of Rock and Roll, Volume 1 1920-1963 with a discussion of the 1920s, when the record industry, reeling from the disruption of radio, accidentally discovered that recordings by Black and “hillbilly” artists moved units. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE⁠⁠⁠⁠...

⁠Host Nate Wilcox asks Michael Corcoran to share the stories of Texas gospel greats Arizona Dranes, Blind Willie Johnson and Washington Phillips as well as the notorious Don Robey, owner of the Duke and Peacock labels. GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- The final 15 minutes of this epis...

Host Nate Wilcox and Ted Anthony, author of “Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song”, work through what a “version” even is when a song has thousands of them: the keyboard solo, the famous opening riff, who heard what from whom, and Anthony’s conclusion that we are never going to sort it out and that this is fine. Songs like this one came out of nowhere, moved around in the shadow...

Season 3 of Let It Roll: From the Beginning… opens with host Nate Wilcox talking to Robert W. Harwood about “I Went Down to St. James Infirmary” - a book about one song and about how confidently the history of a song can be wrong. Almost everything widely believed about “St. James Infirmary” turns out to be untrue. It is not a variant of “The Unfortunate Rake,” the British broadside that gives us...

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Bob Stanley to discuss “Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music, A History” - the prequel to his own earlier book, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé”. That one started in 1955 and ran forward through the rock and roll era. This one goes back and asks what the word “pop” meant before rock and roll took the name away from it. The answer is th...

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes James Kaplan to discuss his book “Irving Berlin: New York Genius” — a life that runs from a Lower East Side childhood to a fifty-year career at the centre of American popular song, and then to almost thirty years of silence. Jerome Kern’s line is the one everybody quotes, and it holds up: Berlin has no place in American music, he is American music. Kaplan and Nate draw th...

Host Nate Wilcox was joined again by Garrett Cash for the second episode of the Holy Roll series which we’re recasting as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning… series, this time on the two people who essentially invented gospel composition as a published, professional craft — Charles Albert Tindley and Lucie E. Campbell. The book under discussion is “We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pi...

We're continuing our recast of all the Let It Roll episodes in chronological order by topic with Ted Gioia on “The History of Jazz,” and host Nate Wilcox takes him all the way back to the start of the book, to the prehistory of the music. There is general agreement that jazz came out of New Orleans; there was a period when people disputed it, and a time when the Soviet Union claimed it started in...

TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes a recording of a 1902 ‘coon song,’ presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the song’s title and in the discussion around it. In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox discuss "Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music." This one is about the first people t...

TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes a recording of a 1902 ‘coon song,’ presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the song’s title and in the discussion around it. In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox discuss "Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music." Peter explains how he came to take o...

We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews Gary Giddins to discuss the opening section of his classic book "Visions of Jazz" including discussions of vaudeville greats Al Jolson and Bert Williams, W.C Handy, the man who "discovered" the blues and Louis Armstrong's signifying takes on old time songs...

We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews Henry Sapoznik, one of the compilers of "Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music." Nate asks Henry about the genesis of the Protobilly CD compilation and the roots of country music in 19th-century American music. This episode original...