pplpod

The double bass is six feet tall, heavy, and historically built to hide at the back of the orchestra. Edgar Meyer, born in 1960, dragged it to the front of the stage in both tuxedo-clad concert halls and dusty progressive bluegrass festivals. This episode explores how mastering the strict rules of one discipline became the key to breaking boundaries in another, starting with his first teacher, his...

In October 2008, Eddie Adcock lay fully awake in an operating room at Vanderbilt University Medical Center playing a five-string banjo while surgeons placed deep brain stimulation electrodes to treat his essential tremor. This episode explores the life of the tinkerer behind that scene, born June 1938 in Scottsville, Virginia, who raised and sold a calf to buy his first banjo, played professionall...

A tombstone in West Lawn Memorial Park in Borger, Texas reads simply World Champion Fiddler. This episode tells the story of the man under it, Alexander Campbell Eck Robertson, born in Arkansas in 1887 and raised on a Texas Panhandle farm, whose father gave up the fiddle to become a preacher while Eck left home at sixteen to play medicine shows through Indian Territory. Drawing on Victor session l...

In 1934, a ten-year-old boy on a North Carolina farm stormed off after a fight with his brother, picked up a banjo, and noticed his fingers falling into a three-finger pattern instead of the two-finger style everyone around him used. This episode traces Earl Scruggs from Flint Hill, where his father died when he was four and he crawled around a banjo laid flat on the floor because he was too small...

The Lone Ranger was very likely inspired by Bass Reeves, a Black deputy U.S. marshal, and the defining version of Home on the Range was collected by John Lomax from a Black cook in San Antonio. This episode follows Dom Flemons, the American Songster, born August 30, 1982 in Phoenix, Arizona, of African American and Mexican heritage, as he digs those buried stories back out of the music. From high...

The same voice that sang Man of Constant Sorrow for the Soggy Bottom Boys in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? later anchored Avicii's Hey Brother at the 2013 Ultra Music Festival, a track that passed one billion Spotify streams in May 2024. This episode explores the career of Dan Tyminski, born June 20, 1960 in Rutland, Vermont, the son of an auto mechanic nicknamed Stosh, and how a mechan...

In 1949 Curly Seckler and his wife Juanita wrote Traveling This Lonesome Road at home and never filed the copyright. Bill Monroe and Mac Wiseman recorded it without credit. This episode follows the man born John Ray Seckler on Christmas Day 1919 in China Grove, North Carolina, from long shifts in a cotton mill and banjo lessons with Happy Trexler, through the Yodeling Rangers and a daily 1935 radi...

At E3 in the summer of 2018, the gameplay trailer for The Last of Us Part II was driven not by a booming orchestra but by the banjo and cello of a progressive string band from Boston. This episode traces Crooked Still from its formation in spring 2001, when New England Conservatory students Aoife O'Donovan and Corey DiMario met Berklee cellist Rushad Eggleston and MIT graduate student and banjo pl...

Four weeks after joining Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in September 1940, Clyde Moody was handed Monroe's own mandolin at the bandleader's first Bluebird recording session, the only known time another Blue Grass Boy played mandolin at a Monroe session. This episode explores the life of the Genial Gentleman of Country Music, born in Cherokee, North Carolina in 1915, from his early days with J.E. Ma...

Clarence White's hands were too small for a standard acoustic guitar as a child, so he started on a ukulele. Before his 30th birthday he had reinvented how the guitar is played in two genres and co-invented a hidden mechanical device that gave him a third hand on stage. This episode follows the French-Canadian prodigy born in Lewiston, Maine in 1944 from the family's move to Burbank, California in...

Born in Oceanside, California in 1981 into a family where music was practically a genetic mandate, Chris Thile picked up the mandolin at five, formed Nickel Creek with the Watkins family at eight, won the Walnut Valley Festival mandolin championship at twelve, and had a record deal by 1993. This episode explores how a child prodigy raised in a strict fundamentalist Christian home and a rigid tradi...

When Led Zeppelin dropped Gallows Pole on Led Zeppelin III in 1970, most listeners heard a modern rock anthem. Folklore scholars heard something else entirely: Child 95, The Maid Freed from the Gallows. This episode traces the life of Francis James Child, the Harvard scholar who spent his career hunting down 305 traditional English and Scottish ballads before he believed the Industrial Revolution...

On July 4, 1957, a car accident sidelined Buzz Busby and the Bayou Boys before a Washington, D.C. holiday show, and a scratch band of local musicians was thrown together to fill the slot. That emergency lineup of Charlie Waller on guitar and lead vocals, John Duffey on mandolin and tenor, Bill Emerson on banjo, and Larry Leahy on bass became the Country Gentlemen. This episode explains how postwar...

When you hear the name Monroe in bluegrass, you think of Bill, but his older brother Charlie was the original lead singer of the Monroe Brothers, and his first big break in show business came as a dancer, not a musician. This episode follows Charlie from his birth in Rosine, Kentucky in July 1903 into a household where sister Bertha played guitar, brother Birch played fiddle, and young Bill played...

In 2007, a state governor officially declared Carl Story the father of bluegrass gospel music, decades after record labels had recorded his band and then locked the results in a vault. This episode follows Story from his birth on May 29, 1916 in Lenoir, North Carolina, where his father played fiddle and his mother played guitar, through his mastery of fiddle, guitar, and clawhammer banjo and the l...

In 1969, fresh out of the U.S. Army, Byron Berline stood on a Southern California sidewalk recording fiddle for the Rolling Stones' Country Honk when a passing car blared its horn, and Mick Jagger decided to keep it on the track. This episode follows the Caldwell, Kansas native who started fiddle at age five, recorded Pickin' and Fiddlin' with the Dillards in 1965, won the National Old Time Fiddle...

In 2007, the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance went to a recording of Whiskey Before Breakfast made in a Colorado hotel room with three vintage Neumann microphones, a laptop, engineer Phil Harris, and Doc Watson sitting across from Bryan Sutton. This episode traces how the Asheville, North Carolina native, born in 1973 to a family of fiddle players and raised in the Pisgah Pickers,...

How does a genre rooted in back-porch jam sessions build an organization capable of producing a dynasty like the Del McCoury Band, which won Entertainer of the Year nine times between 1994 and 2004, including five consecutive years? This episode examines the International Bluegrass Music Association, founded in 1985 as a nonprofit trade association in Owensboro, Kentucky, at a moment when MTV-era...

After recording roughly 100 songs for RCA between 1937 and 1941, brothers Bill and Earl Bolick were asked by the label to add an electric guitar to their sound. They refused, stopped recording, and by 1951 had left the industry entirely, Bill taking a job as a postal clerk in North Carolina and Earl working at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Atlanta. This episode traces the Blue Sky Boys from their...

William Lee Apostol, known as Billy Strings, has won three Grammys for best bluegrass album, sold out sports arenas, and played electric guitar on stage with the Canadian death metal band Cryptopsy. This episode traces how that contradiction was forged, beginning in Lansing, Michigan in 1992, the death of his biological father from a heroin overdose when he was two, and the stepfather Terry Barber...

This episode approaches Bill Monroe's life through a single theme: friction. The youngest of eight children born in 1911 near Rosine, Kentucky, he was handed a mandolin nobody else wanted, told to strip half its strings off, and orphaned by 16. His uncle Pendleton Vandiver hardwired Scottish and Irish fiddle rhythms into his brain, while the traveling Black musician Arnold Shultz introduced him to...

As the youngest of eight children on a farm near Rosine, Kentucky, Bill Monroe was forced by his older brothers to remove four of the eight strings from his mandolin so he would play more quietly. He lost his mother at 10 and his father at 16, then found stability with his disabled uncle Pendleton Vandiver, the fiddler behind the song Uncle Pen, and absorbed the blues from Black fiddler and guitar...

Named Bela Anton Leo Fleck after composers Bartok, Webern, and Janacek, the New York City kid seemed destined for concert halls, but what actually hooked him was Earl Scruggs playing The Beverly Hillbillies theme and Dueling Banjos on the radio. This episode traces the 15-year-old whose grandfather bought him a used banjo at a New Jersey garage sale, the stranger on a train platform who tuned it a...

Benny Martin left Sparta, Tennessee as a teenager with a fiddle under his arm and within a few years was replacing Chubby Wise in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. This episode follows his rapid rise through the 1940s and 1950s Nashville sideman economy, from Monroe in 1948 to Don Reno's Tennessee Cut-Ups in 1949, Roy Acuff's Smoky Mountain Boys on the Grand Ole Opry in 1950, and Flatt and Scruggs' F...

Name-checked in Le Tigre's punk anthem Hot Topic, Alice Gerrard is a bluegrass and old-time legend who was born in Seattle in 1934 to a mother from Yakima and a father from Wigan, England, with no inherited Appalachian tradition at all. This episode draws on her 2025 autobiography Custom Made Woman, reviews of her Folkways records, and a 2026 CBS News retrospective to trace how she discovered folk...