pplpod

Jerry Garcia once compared a bluegrass fiddler to Charlie Parker. That fiddler was Calvin Scott Stoneman, better known as Scotty Stoneman, one of the greatest and most complex instrumentalists in American roots music. This deep dive explores his life, his wildly innovative musical mechanics and his tragic trajectory, from a Maryland household of 23 children to the Kentucky Colonels and his death f...

At 18, still a high school senior, Sarah Jarosz signed with Sugar Hill Records, released her debut Song Up in Her Head and earned her first Grammy nomination. Then, instead of hitting the road, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music. This deep dive examines how choosing a dorm room over a tour bus turned her into a pillar of modern Americana. We trace her roots in Wimberley, Texas,...

In the rural South of the 1930s, a woman divorced her husband, kept touring with him for years, and then married his first cousin. She was not a rock star. She was Sara Carter, frontwoman of the original Carter Family and an architect of traditional American country music. This deep dive explores how a woman born in 1898 in Copper Creek, Virginia, helped launch a commercial industry while defying...

Imagine your industry voting your team its highest award every year for seven years straight. That is what IIIrd Tyme Out did, winning the IBMA Vocal Group of the Year from 1994 to 2000. This deep dive traces the bluegrass and gospel powerhouse from its 1991 founding in Cumming, Georgia, through decades of industry upheaval and roster changes to a commercial peak more than 20 years into its career...

When Rose Maddox walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage in the 1940s in a custom Nathan Turk Western costume with a bare midriff, the crowd gasped. She did not care. This deep dive traces her from a sharecropping family in Boaz, Alabama, who left for California in 1933 with $35 for seven people, to a pioneer who permanently altered country, rockabilly and bluegrass music. We follow the Maddox family...

At 13, Ronnie McCoury saw Bill Monroe play live, picked up a mandolin, and six months later was touring with his father's band. This deep dive traces the American bluegrass mandolinist, singer, songwriter and producer from York County, Pennsylvania, through eight consecutive IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year awards and a career that bridges the founders of the genre and the modern cross-genre lands...

Bluegrass legends are supposed to come from Kentucky hollers, not a French-speaking household in Madawaska, Maine. Yet that is where Roland Joseph LeBlanc, known to the world as mandolin master Roland White, was forged. This deep dive follows his 83 years through the lens of translation: carrying southern music to northern and western audiences, absorbing the mechanics of the genre from its founde...

The driving banjo on Beyonce's Texas Hold 'Em is not an anonymous session player. It is Rhiannon Giddens, a MacArthur Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and scholar of history. This deep dive traces how a classically trained opera singer from Greensboro, North Carolina, became a pivotal figure in reclaiming the Black history of country and folk music and dismantling the boundaries between gen...

At the 2002 Grammy Awards, the Best Male Country Vocal Performance went not to a polished radio star but to a 75-year-old from the Appalachian mountains singing a terrifying song about mortality, completely a cappella. This deep dive traces Ralph Stanley from Big Spraddle Creek in Dickenson County, Virginia, to honorary doctorates from Yale and the highest honor the U.S. government gives to artist...

In the 1920s the average American worker earned about $700 a year. Ralph Peer was pulling down $1 million. This deep dive tells the story of the invisible architect who discovered the foundational DNA of country, blues and R&B, from supervising Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues in 1920 to the Bristol Sessions of 1927, and who invented the financial machinery of the modern music business along the way....

It began with a group of heartbroken musicians commiserating over an unreasonably expensive steakhouse dinner. This deep dive charts the 20-year biography of Punch Brothers, from mandolinist Chris Thile's post-divorce need for a bigger musical container in 2006 to a Grammy-winning institution that blurred the line between a back-porch string band and a classical chamber ensemble. We unpack the Mar...

Ernest Pop Stoneman sold an estimated two million copies of Sinking of the Titanic in the 1920s, helped Ralph Peer discover the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers at the 1927 Bristol Sessions, and then lost everything in the Great Depression. This deep dive traces his life from a log cabin in Carroll County, Virginia, to a self-built shack in Carmody Hills, Maryland, and a job at the Naval Gun Facto...

Picture mountain music and you probably see blistering banjo solos and matching suits. But the real roots of old-time music are messier, more collaborative and far more diverse than the bluegrass stereotype. This deep dive explores how the sound works mechanically, why the name itself was a 1920s marketing euphemism coined by OKeh Records, and how a grassroots dance tradition survived commercializ...

Old Crow Medicine Show started as shivering teenagers busking on street corners with 80-year-old acoustic instruments. This deep dive follows Ketch Secor and Critter Fuqua from seventh grade in Harrisonburg, Virginia, through the old-time scene of Ithaca, New York, a cassette-funded busking tour across Canada, and a found house on Beech Mountain, North Carolina, to the Grand Ole Opry, a Grammy and...

Norman Blake dropped out of high school at 16 with no formal training, no famous connections and no internet, yet went on to lay the acoustic foundation for Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. This deep dive traces his life from a wooden radio in Sulphur Springs, Alabama, through Nashville session work, a 20-year duo with classically trained cellist Nancy Short, a...

Nickel Creek began in 1989 as a kids' bluegrass band playing a pizza joint in Carlsbad, California, backed by one of their dads on upright bass. Chris Thile and Sean Watkins studied with the same mandolin instructor, John Moore, while Sean's younger sister Sara took fiddle lessons from Moore's bandmate Dennis Caplinger, and the band name came from a song written by her teacher. An early instrument...

Bascom Lamar Lunsford was born in 1882 in Mars Hill, North Carolina, deep in Madison County, where his mother sang traditional ballads and his schoolteacher father gave him his first fiddle. He played banjo at square dances as a boy, then diverged from the usual path: he qualified as a teacher at Rutherford College, taught in Madison County schools, and earned a law degree in 1913 from Trinity Col...

Molly Rose Tuttle was born in January 1993 in Santa Clara, California, and grew up in Palo Alto. Diagnosed with alopecia areata at three, which progressed to alopecia universalis and total body hair loss, she found a shield in the guitar at age eight, was on stage by 11 alongside her father, bluegrass instructor Jack Tuttle, recorded the duet album The Old Apple Tree with him at 13, and joined the...

Molly O'Day was born Suzanne Dobson Noonan in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1909, the youngest of 11 children of a judge, Thomas Francis Patrick Noonan, and a Metropolitan Opera singer, Hannah Kelly. After the judge's death the family fractured: sisters Sally and Isabelle headed west to act, while brother John drew a seven-year prison sentence in 1930 for receiving stolen property and brother Victor fac...

Missy Raines was born in April 1962 in Short Gap, West Virginia, and was touring professionally on the double bass as a teenager behind pioneers like Mac Wiseman, Kenny Baker, Josh Graves, and Eddie and Martha Adcock. In traditional bluegrass the bass is the engine room, glued to root-and-fifth notes on the downbeat and built to make everyone else look good, but Raines mastered that role so comple...

Marty Stuart was born in Mississippi in 1958, and at a 1970 hometown fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the 12-year-old watched Connie Smith perform and told his mother he would marry her someday, which he did in 1997. By 12 he was playing professionally with the gospel group the Sullivans, and after mandolinist Roland White invited him to a Delaware concert in 1972, the 14-year-old was hired into...

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...