Let It Roll EXTRA

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Near the end of a long tour, Louis Armstrong’s lip split open on stage. He was pushing for a high note and blood was running down his face. The musicians in the band were crying, but the drummer kept driving them until Armstrong hit the note and held it. The drummer was Chick Webb: four feet tall, crippled...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com At the Sunset Club on 12th Street the joint never closed. Big Joe Turner tended bar and shouted the blues while he poured, Pete Johnson pounded the piano, and by sunup there could be fifteen musicians on the stage jamming. The club had a speaker out on the sidewalk, but Joe didn’t need it. Andy Kirk said he...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Jean Ritchie learned the old ballads the old way - at home in eastern Kentucky, from her own family, songs that had come down through generations. She may have been the last important singer who did. And the folklorist Maud Karpeles ruled that she could not be called a folk singer. Her offense? She went to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In 1946 Louis Jordan had the number one record on the R&B chart for most of the year. He crossed over to pop, he was in the movies, Chuck Berry admitted to the day he died that Jordan was who he had set out to be - and Jordan lived until 1975 and could not buy a hit. Ed Ward knew why. “The clown always wind...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Show up to a jazz gig and there is no rehearsal. The bandleader calls a tune and expects you to know it, and if you don’t, you are not working next week. Ted Gioia used to write lists of those tunes for his piano students - what to learn, in what key - until he realised nobody had ever written the book. So...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com 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 coll...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Gary Giddins agreed to write a 300-page Bing Crosby book in three years so he could get back to Duke Ellington. That was more than twenty-five years ago. He started out half-believing the hatchet jobs and found instead a man the people he interviewed kept calling the nicest, kindest and most generous they e...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In 1917 a white New Orleans band that was not the original anything and could not spell its own genre put out a record that sounded, in Peter Doggett’s words, like “a gang of crazed instrumentalists fighting for supremacy.” Within ten years the microphone had made it possible to sing in a whisper, radio had...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com 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:...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Ralph Peer went to Victor with an offer no record man has made before or since: pay me a dollar a year, and let me keep the publishing. Victor took it. It looks like modesty and it was the opposite - publishing was where the money had always been, and Peer had worked out that the way to get rich in the reco...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Ralph Peer was not an employee of anybody. He was an independent contractor working exclusively for RCA Victor, and he had set up a publishing company - which meant he had a reason to look for performers who wrote their own material, and a reason to pass some of that money back to them. So in the summer of...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In August 1927 the Carter Family drove all day to Bristol, Virginia - Maybelle heavily pregnant, bouncing over rutted roads in a Model T that A.P. Carter had to repair two or three times on the way. At that first session they recorded “ The Storms Are on the Ocean ” - one of four Child ballads they would re...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Elijah Wald explains that pop music is what teenage girls like to dance to, and its history has almost all been written by men who had no dates in high school. His book is called “ How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll ” but he might as well have called it “How Paul Whiteman Failed to Destroy Jazz.” Host...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The biggest-selling record in the United States in 1924 was a country record that was also the year’s biggest pop hit. It was “The Prisoner’s Song,” backed with “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and it was the first country record to sell a million copies. The man who sang it was born Marion Try Slaughter in Jeffe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The date Ed Ward starts from is February 14th, 1920, and the principle he says the record business discovered that day was: record it and see if it sells. Mamie Smith had already cut sides that moved most of a hundred thousand copies. Then came “Crazy Blues,” and the sales figures Ed and Nate cite - 75,000...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Michael Corcoran’s method came from a piece of advice and a baseball adage. The advice was Mack McCormick’s - the great unpublished Robert Johnson biographer, who nearly shut the door in Corcoran’s face the first time he turned up. What Corcoran took from the evening was that if McCormick had already worked...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com “ Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America ” is not a band biography. It is a book about a substance and the country it moved through, and the Grateful Dead are the connecting thread rather than the subject - the vector, to borrow the word Ted Anthony used about Alan Lomax. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes author...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com There is no guest on this one, and that is the point. The Seance Roll series is host Nate Wilcox in conversation with authors who are dead, or simply unreachable, whose work shaped his thinking anyway. Henry Pleasants was a music critic who lived from 1910 to 2000, and in 1955 he published “The Agony of Mod...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The Velvet Underground are the standard example of a band whose importance has nothing to do with how many records they sold. What gets lost in the retelling is how strange the arrangement actually was: a Long Island pop songwriter who had been grinding out knock-offs for a budget label, a Welsh viola playe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Joe Yanosik, author of “A Consumer Guide to the Plastic People of the Universe,” joins host Nate Wilcox to tell the whole story: the tapes smuggled out of the country in the mid-seventies, the album pressed in Ireland and released in London by two expatriates without the band’s knowledge, the copy that made...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Yoko Ono does not get a fair shot. She is one of the most famous people alive and one whose name-ID-to-listener ratio is possibly the worst of any massive celebrity and most of what is believed about her is either wrong or beside the point. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Madeline Bocaro author of “ In Your Mind:...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com 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 at 1955 and ran forward through the rock and roll era. This one goes back and...