pplpod

As a teenager, Sam Bush played mandolin for Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, and got a deadpan verdict: stick to the fiddle. He kept playing mandolin anyway, and the Kentucky State Legislature eventually named him the father of newgrass by a unanimous 37 to 0 vote. This deep dive traces his upbringing in Bowling Green, Kentucky, learning from his father's record collection and the Flatt and S...

In 2014, a Tennessee town went to federal court for the right to rename itself after a song written in about 15 minutes as a procrastination break. This deep dive traces Rocky Top from a 1967 hotel room at the Gatlinburg Inn, where husband and wife songwriters Felice and Boudleaux Bryant were grinding through slow songs for a Chet Atkins and Archie Campbell project and dashed off a fast bluegrass...

The most awarded instrumentalist in International Bluegrass Music Association history was born and raised in San Francisco. This deep dive traces Rob Ickes from his 1992 move to Nashville through a 1994 rookie season in which he helped found Blue Highway and played on two Grammy-winning albums, including The Great Dobro Sessions produced by Jerry Douglas and Tut Taylor, where he was the youngest p...

In the early 1960s, a seven-year-old walked into the Grand Ole Opry to audition and was turned away as too young, even though he had already shared a stage with Bill Monroe at six and appeared on television with Flatt and Scruggs. This deep dive traces Ricky Skaggs from his 1954 birth in Cordell, Kentucky, through his teenage partnership with Keith Whitley, the 1970 invitation to join Ralph Stanle...

At eight years old, Rhonda Vincent was in a studio recording a commercial single of Mule Skinner Blues on mandolin, and to her it was just a normal day. This deep dive traces the fifth-generation musician from her 1962 birth in Kirksville, Missouri, and her childhood in Greentop, singing gospel with the family's Sally Mountain Show at five, receiving a snare drum at six, a mandolin at eight and a...

A traditional Appalachian yodel over a 1987 Art of Noise synth track is one of the strangest anomalies in modern music, and the voice belongs to a man who learned his craft from the father of bluegrass himself. This deep dive traces Peter Rowan from his 1942 birth in Massachusetts and his 1956 rockabilly band the Cupids, through the Northeast folk revival, to his 1964 audition in Nashville that la...

On July 19, 1989, Pete Wernick survived the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 in an Iowa cornfield, lost his instruments, and played a festival gig on borrowed gear 48 hours later. This deep dive uses that moment as a window into a life that refuses to follow any expected path: a Jewish kid born in New York City in 1946 who picked up the banjo at 14, hosted the city's only bluegrass radio progra...

In 2001, at the peak of boy bands, nu metal and auto-tuned pop, a soundtrack of Depression-era folk, bluegrass, country and gospel climbed to number one on the Billboard 200 and won Album of the Year at both the Grammys and the CMA Awards. This deep dive unpacks how producers T Bone Burnett and Allan Lerman inverted the normal Hollywood process, conceiving and recording the entire O Brother, Where...

A colorblind Jewish kid from Skokie, Illinois, is not where you would expect a progressive bluegrass pioneer to come from. This deep dive traces Noam Pikelny from beginner banjo lessons at age eight, taken because his older brother already played mandolin, through study at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music and with Greg Cahill of Special Consensus, to the moment an album by Bela Fleck and th...

In the early 1970s, a band with mandolin, banjo and fiddle walked on stage with hair past their shoulders and launched into Beatles songs, protest anthems and Bob Marley grooves. This deep dive traces New Grass Revival from their roots in the Bluegrass Alliance, where Sam Bush and Courtney Johnson joined Ebo Walker, through the 1972 rebrand with Dobro player Curtis Burch and the debut album The Ar...

In 1975, an 18-year-old in Florida won state championships on both fiddle and mandolin. Instead of becoming a local legend, Mike Marshall spent the rest of his life rewriting what the mandolin could do. This deep dive follows him from a traditional bluegrass upbringing in Lakeland, Florida, to the moment he heard David Grisman's jazz- and Latin-inflected acoustic music, packed up, and moved to Cal...

Mike Auldridge helped found the Seldom Scene and revolutionized how the Dobro is played, yet he did it while working full time as a commercial graphic artist. This deep dive traces his life from his birth in Washington, D.C., in 1938 and his youth in Kensington, Maryland, where a postwar migration from the rural South turned the capital region into a thriving bluegrass hub. His uncle Ellsworth T....

When you picture a lead guitarist, you probably do not imagine a teenage girl in 1920s rural Appalachia. Yet that is where the guitar was first pushed from the rhythm section to the front of the stage. This deep dive looks past the matronly nickname Mother Maybelle to reveal a relentless innovator: born Maybelle Addington in Nickelsville, Virginia, in 1909, she studied guitar from age 13, married...

On New Year's Eve 1989, members of two incomplete bands, the Salmonheads and the Left Hand String Band, drove through the snow to Crested Butte, Colorado, to play a gig at the Eldo. Somewhere on that icy road they named themselves after the leftover pieces they had: Leftover Salmon. This deep dive traces how a one-night triage operation became a foundational pillar of the jam band and jamgrass sce...

Hired by Flatt and Scruggs in 1955 to play upright bass, Burkett Howard Graves instead borrowed Earl Scruggs' three-finger banjo roll, applied it to the resophonic guitar, and permanently changed the sound of bluegrass. This episode follows Uncle Josh from his 1927 birth in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, through professional work at age 15 with the Pierce Brothers in Gatlinburg, years backing Esco Han...

As a small child in Viper, Kentucky, Jean Ritchie secretly taught herself her father's forbidden dulcimer, and when he caught her he declared her a natural born musician. This episode follows the youngest of 14 children from a family that shared an oral repertoire of more than 300 ballads, hymns and work songs, through her University of Kentucky degree in social work, her move to New York's Henry...

For the first three decades of his life, Kenny Baker had little interest in bluegrass. This episode follows the fiddler born June 26, 1926 in Burdine, Kentucky, who worked the coal mines for Bethlehem Steel and served in the Navy before pursuing music, and whose ears were tuned to western swing fiddler Marion Sumner and the jazz of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli rather than local mountain...

Born in Lexington, Kentucky on August 27, 1937, J.D. Crowe learned the rules of bluegrass so thoroughly that he earned the right to rewrite them. This episode follows his early gigs with Pee Wee Lambert and Curly Parker, his 1954 hiring at age 17 by Jimmy Martin's Sunny Mountain Boys, and the 42 studio tracks he recorded with Martin between 1956 and 1960 that made him a flawless rhythmic engine pl...

Sara Watkins, Aoife O'Donovan and Sarah Jarosz were each established solo artists raised in the technical world of bluegrass before a 2014 vocal workshop at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival revealed how their voices blended. This episode traces the trio's history, including the decade-wide age gap, Jarosz meeting Watkins at a festival when she was nine, O'Donovan noticing her mature playing at 15,...

When entertainer Smokey Ward forgot Frank Brown Jr.'s name on live radio at WPFB in Middletown, Ohio, he improvised the nickname Hylo, a nod to a voice that could hit high tenor and low bass in the same breath. This episode follows Hylo Brown from his 1922 birth in River, Kentucky and his family's migration to Springfield, Ohio, through radio work beginning in 1939 at WCMI in Ashland and WLOG in W...

A self-described magician, filmmaker and West Coast bohemian, Harry Smith obsessively collected shellac 78s recorded between 1927 and 1932, the window that opened with electronic recording and slammed shut with the Great Depression. This episode explains how his 1947 meeting with Moses Asch of Folkways Records led to the Anthology of American Folk Music, an 84-track set released in August 1952 wit...

In 1968, two versions of the same banjo instrumental by the same artist sat on the Billboard Hot 100 at once, nearly 20 years after the song was first cut. This episode traces Foggy Mountain Breakdown from its December 11, 1949 recording by Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, explaining the breakdown format that rotates solos among players and why guitarists and mandolinists still learn...

The rapid-fire twang behind 1960s car chases and sitcom themes is the product of a precise technique called Scruggs style. This episode explains what banjo playing looked like before Earl Scruggs, from clawhammer and frailing to minstrel, parlor and jazz plectrum styles, and then breaks down the biomechanics of his approach: metal fingerpicks, a thumb pick, and the ring and pinky fingers planted o...

As a teenager, Doug Dillard convinced his parents to drive across state lines so he could knock on Earl Scruggs' door, and Scruggs installed Scruggs tuners on his banjo right there. This episode follows the Missouri farm kid born in 1937 from a family band and live radio on KSMO, through the Ozark Mountain Boys and the Dixie Ramblers with John Hartford, to the 1962 formation of the Dillards with b...

In 1943, a 17-year-old Don Reno received a job offer from Bill Monroe and turned it down to enlist in the Army, eventually serving with Merrill's Marauders in the jungles of Burma. This episode follows the Carolina farm kid who borrowed a guitar at age five, played radio with the Morris Brothers at 13 and Arthur Smith at 14, and came home from the war to find audiences telling him he sounded like...