pplpod

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...

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...