pplpod

More than 75,000 people, a lineup mixing rock icons with folk legends, and over 10 million dollars for the local economy, all on a community college campus in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. This episode tells the story of MerleFest, beginning with the bond between blind guitar great Doc Watson and his son Merle, who served as his rhythm guitarist, driver and tour manager for two decades before dying...

Born Arthel Watson in Deep Gap, North Carolina in 1923, Doc Watson lost his sight before age two and went on to change how the acoustic guitar is played. This episode covers the radio audience that gave him his nickname, the dead chestnut trees he chopped to buy a mail-order Sears Silvertone, the mountain repertoire he memorized by ear, and the 1953 gig with Jack Williams' band in Johnson City whe...

A 17-year-old from New Jersey stepping on stage to play mandolin with Doc Watson is where this story begins. This episode follows David Grisman from a Hackensack childhood with a trombonist father, through piano and saxophone lessons that gave him a jazz horn player's mindset, to the Greenwich Village folk scene, the Even Dozen Jug Band, Red Allen's Kentuckians and the psychedelic band Earth Opera...

David Grier has played on Grammy-nominated albums across three decades and been named IBMA Guitarist of the Year three times. This episode looks at how he redefined the acoustic guitar in bluegrass, starting with a childhood in Nashville where his father Lamar Grier played banjo for Bill Monroe, Roland White helped him learn the fretboard, and Clarence White showed what a lead acoustic guitar coul...

If you have ever caught the bouncy acoustic theme of NPR's Car Talk, you have heard Darol Anger. This episode traces the life of the San Francisco-born violinist, from his 1977 arrival as a founding member of the David Grisman Quintet, where progressive bluegrass or dawg music ported jazz harmony and syncopated Latin and swing rhythms onto fiddle and mandolin, to his development of a percussive, r...

In 2008 a brand-new bluegrass act won both Emerging Artist of the Year and Entertainer of the Year at the IBMA Awards, along with Album of the Year, Vocal Group of the Year and Male Vocalist of the Year. This episode explains how Jamie Dailey and Darren Vincent pulled off that impossible debut by spending nearly a decade, from 1999 to 2008, as sidemen with Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver and Ricky Sk...

Robert Russell Wise, known to the world as Chubby, did not pick up a fiddle until age 12, having spent his early years in St. Augustine, Florida on banjo and guitar. This episode argues that late start was his secret weapon: years of rhythm playing hardwired a metronome into his bow arm, freeing him to master pitch on a fretless fingerboard and develop the aggressive, rhythm-heavy bowing that beca...

Bobby Osborne grew up helping run the family general store in Thousand Sticks, Kentucky, and knew nothing about bluegrass until a late-night WSM broadcast of Earl Scruggs playing Cumberland Gap bounced off the ionosphere and into his valley. He dropped out of high school to form a band with his brother Sonny, then was drafted into the Marine Corps in 1951, wounded in Korea and awarded a Purple Hea...

Bobby Hicks won the North Carolina state fiddle championship at age 11 playing Black Mountain Rag, then joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in 1953 and was handed an upright bass instead of a fiddle. This episode follows how that willingness to pay dues led to a December 1954 recording session on fiddle with the father of bluegrass and a career that stretched more than fifty years. Born in Newton...

Bluegrass sounds like it has echoed through Appalachian hollers for centuries, but it is a 1940s invention shaped by jazz structure and named after one man's band. This episode unpacks the raw materials, Scottish, English and Irish fiddle traditions meeting the West African lineage of the banjo and the blues, and shows how Bill Monroe synthesized them into a strict new standard with his Blue Grass...

Bill Keith turned down the Dueling Banjos session for Deliverance because he was in Europe and wanted to visit a girl in Ireland, suggesting they call Eric Weissberg instead. That anecdote captures a musician driven by curiosity rather than fame. Born in Boston in 1939 and an Amherst College graduate in French literature and mathematics, Keith was an outsider who looked at bluegrass banjo as a puz...

In 2007 five musicians from Haywood County, North Carolina named their new band after the Great Balsam Range, then dropped the word Great before their first gig because it sounded pretentious. This episode traces how that grounded instinct carried Balsam Range from a casual local jam to IBMA Album of the Year and multi-genre Billboard success without ever leaving home. The original lineup was anyt...

Aoife O'Donovan grew up in Newton, Massachusetts on Joan Baez and Bob Dylan records, spent summers in Ireland singing traditional songs with extended family, and then took the least obvious route into folk music: a degree in contemporary improvisation from the New England Conservatory in 2003. This episode explains why studying how to deconstruct a song's harmonic architecture became her superpowe...

When Alan Munde auditioned for Jimmy Martin in 1969, Martin rejected his flowing melodic banjo style and demanded a flawless impression of J.D. Crowe's driving three-finger sound. Munde took the job anyway, spent two years as a Sunny Mountain Boy while teaching school in Nashville by day, and quietly kept developing his own approach at home. This episode argues that apprenticeship in someone else'...

Sister Sadie sounds like a tribute to a beloved church matriarch, but Horace Silver later admitted he never knew anyone by that name. He wrote the music first and the title simply popped into his head because the syllables had the right rhythmic snap. This episode uses that phantom muse as a lens on Silver's genius, tracing the tune from its late-August 1959 Blue Note session for Blowin' the Blues...

When Hazel Dickens died in 2011, major outlets reported her birth year as 1935. Her family corrected the record: she was born June 1, 1925, in Montcalm, Mercer County, West Virginia, one of eleven children in a coal-mining family whose father was a Primitive Baptist minister and banjo player. That extra decade matters, because it places her childhood squarely in the coal camps whose struggles she...

Walk into a Greensky Bluegrass show expecting a quiet string band and you get a blackout, a distorted chord and an arena-style laser rig instead. That contradiction is the point. This episode traces the band from a fall 2000 open mic in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where a banjo player, a guitarist and a mandolinist with no bluegrass roots joined forces, through the 2004 debut Less Than Supper, a revolvin...

Louis Marshall Jones was born in 1913 in Niagara, Kentucky, the youngest of ten children in a sharecropping family where his father played old-time fiddle and his mother sang ballads and played concertina. He was performing in public by age 11, absorbed the WLS Barn Dance and Jimmie Rodgers records, and in 1937 learned the clawhammer banjo style that defined his sound from a woman named Cousin Emm...

In 1678 the sovereign council of Martinique banned enslaved Africans from gathering to dance to an instrument they called the banza. That decree opens a sweeping history of the banjo, an instrument descended from West and Central African lutes like the akonting, rebuilt in the Americas from gourds, animal skin and plant-fiber strings, and named through a transatlantic game of telephone that produc...

Born Clarence Earl McCurry in 1895 and raised in his grandfather's boarding house in Shouns, Tennessee, Tom Ashley absorbed English ballads from his mother and aunts alongside the songs of itinerant lumberjacks, railroad workers and miners passing through. He got a banjo at eight, learned the haunting G modal sawmill tuning, and at 16 left town with a traveling medicine show, playing banjo on the...

Alison Krauss holds 27 Grammy Awards, trailing only a handful of names in recording history, and she did it with a purely acoustic sound. This episode traces her path from a five-year-old in Champaign, Illinois who hated classical violin lessons and would rather roller skate, to the moment her mother bought her a bluegrass instruction book and a Richard Greene record for a county fair fiddle conte...

At the peak of his career, after surviving a drive-by shooting outside the Red Fox Inn in Bethesda, Maryland in February 1972, banjo master Bill Emerson left the music industry and enlisted in the United States Navy for twenty years. This episode follows William Hundley Emerson Jr., born in January 1938, from the 1957 car accident that sidelined bandleader Buzz Busby and forced Emerson and guitari...

How does a kid born in Emory Gap, Tennessee in 1934 go from playing gospel on Dayton, Ohio radio to performing with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, then opening stadium shows for the Grateful Dead? This episode explores the restless career of mandolin pioneer Frank Wakefield, who was proficient on harmonica, guitar, and upright bass by age eight, switched to mandolin at sixteen af...

A purely acoustic banjo-and-guitar instrumental fueled the car chases in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, and the same duo took a sitcom theme to number one on the country charts. This episode explores how Lester Flatt of Tennessee and Earl Scruggs of North Carolina met in 1945 as hired musicians in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, left in early 1948 to form the Foggy Mountain Boys, and built a sonic...

In 1945 Bill Monroe wrote Blue Moon of Kentucky as a slow, sorrowful waltz sung in his high lonesome style. Nine years later, in a sweltering Sun Studio session in July 1954, bassist Bill Black started beating on his upright bass and mocking the song in an exaggerated falsetto to blow off steam. Elvis Presley and guitarist Scotty Moore jumped in, the waltz became a driving 4/4 blues, and producer...