pplpod

One band from the London suburbs launched Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, and in just five years mutated from Chicago blues purists into the architectural blueprint for heavy metal. This episode treats the Yardbirds as a living organism, starting in 1963 with Keith Relf and Jim McCarty's Metropolitan Blues Quartet, the two competing origin stories for the Yardbirds name, replacing the Roll...

Before Mike Judge created Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, he spent about a year from 1989 to 1990 playing bass in a touring blues band. This episode moves the spotlight a few feet over to the man leading that band: Anson Funderburgh, born in 1954 in Plano, Texas, a master guitarist who fused the aggressive engine of Chicago blues with the swinging, spacious phrasing of Texas blues over...

Selwyn Birchwood shatters the stereotype of the self-taught juke joint bluesman. Born in 1985 in Orlando, Florida, to a father from Tobago and a mother from the UK, he picked up the guitar at 13 playing 1990s pop and rock, reverse-engineered Jimi Hendrix's influences back to Buddy Guy, Lightnin' Hopkins, Freddie King and Albert King, and was jolted into a lifelong calling by a Buddy Guy concert at...

A six-foot-seven man hears a scruffy kid busking a Muddy Waters song on a train platform at Twickenham Station and hires him on the spot. The kid is Rod Stewart. A few years later that same man forms a band called Bluesology, hires a keyboard player named Reg Dwight, and unknowingly supplies half of the stage name Elton John. This episode asks how Long John Baldry, born in 1941 in a wartime matern...

A 60-year-old woman helps a lost little girl find her mother in a Washington, D.C. department store, and the trajectory of modern folk and rock changes forever. The girl was Peggy Seeger, the mother was composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, and the woman was Elizabeth Cotten, a self-taught domestic worker from North Carolina who had invented a legendary guitar technique as a child, then walked away from...

The ZZ Top origin story most people expect involves dusty Texas roadhouses and cheap sunglasses. The real one starts with a Houston kid, born in 1949 to a concert pianist father who worked at MGM Studios, being sent to New York City to study Afro-Caribbean percussion under Latin jazz legend Tito Puente. This episode traces how Billy Gibbons absorbed polyrhythmic drumming, Texas blues, psychedelia...

At 11 years old Marcus King was tracking guitar parts on his father's blues album, and by eight he was already gigging with his dad in South Carolina. This episode follows the third-generation Greenville musician from a family steeped in blues and gospel, through late-night club gigs as a teenager, dropping out of high school to earn a GED and study jazz theory at the Fine Arts Center, and the 201...

Hambone Willie Newburn helped invent a piece of the DNA of American music and left behind exactly six recordings. Born around 1901 in Haywood County, Tennessee, near Brownsville on State Route 19, he played guitar, mandolin and sang at country dances and house parties before traveling to Atlanta in 1929 to cut six sides for OKeh Records. One of them was among the earliest known versions of Rollin'...

In the mid-1950s a young Elvis Presley made a point of watching Nappy Brown perform whenever he played the clubs in Memphis. Born in October 1929 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised by Fred and Maggie Culp after his mother's death, Brown learned to sing in the Gethsemane AME Zion Church, then carried that congregation-moving power, wide vibrato and heavy melisma into a 1954 Savoy Records cont...

The first person to record the rock and roll standard Kansas City was not a household name but an 18-year-old piano prodigy. Born Willie Littlefield Jr. on September 16, 1931 in El Campo, Texas, and raised in Houston, he was packing the clubs on Dowling Street by age 16, cutting sides for Eddie's Records and leading a band with school friend and saxophonist Don Wilkerson. His regional hit Little W...

When Bob Dylan asked Mavis Staples to marry him in the 1960s, she turned him down and kept singing with her family. Born in Chicago on July 10, 1939, she joined the Staple Singers in 1950 alongside her father Pops and siblings Purvis, Cleotha and Yvonne, went full-time on the road after high school in 1957 following the hit Uncloudy Day, and helped the family evolve from church hymns to what they...

Tommy Castro pairs James Brown-style soul vocals with B.B. King-style guitar, and he kept a century-old tradition alive by adapting how it reached people. Born in San Jose in April 1955, he picked up guitar around age 10, learned crowd control in 1970s Bay Area cover bands, joined the Warner Bros.-signed Dynatones in the 1980s, and formed his own sax-driven band in 1991. His 1996 Blind Pig album E...

Tommy McLennan's rough, energetic guitar found its way onto Bob Dylan's 1962 debut album, yet he died in Chicago in near obscurity and lay in an unmarked grave for over 50 years. Born January 4, 1905 in Durant, Mississippi, he played juke joints where a quiet melody could not survive the room, then recorded for Bluebird Records from 1939 to 1942, cutting Bottle It Up and Go, New Highway No. 51, Sh...

The person driving your Chicago Transit Authority bus might be an internationally touring, award-nominated blues star. Toronto Cannon, born on Valentine's Day 1968 and raised on the South Side near the Robert Taylor Homes and the legendary Theresa's Lounge, did not buy his first guitar until age 22, and his first musical pursuit was reggae rather than blues. That syncopated detour gave him a rhyth...

W.C. Clark left Austin convinced its R&B scene was dead, joined Joe Tex's national touring band, then quit two weeks after sitting in on bass at an East Austin jam with Jimmie Vaughan and Paul Ray. Born Wesley Curley Clark on November 16, 1939, he started in a church choir, picked up guitar around 14, absorbed jazz and blues, and drew attention from Big Joe Turner, Albert Collins and Little Jo...

In 1937 Count Basie offered Helen Humes $35 a week to fill the spot vacated by Billie Holiday, and she declined because she already made $35 a week in Cincinnati. Born in 1913 in Louisville, Kentucky, to one of the city's first Black attorneys and a schoolteacher, she recorded blues for OKeh at 14, then walked away for a decade to finish school, study finance and work at a bank, as a waitress and...

An American slide guitar master who worked with Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and released more than 50 albums spent his last three decades in Hanover, Germany. Born Iverson Minter in March 1932 in Bessemer, Alabama, he lost his mother to pneumonia soon after birth and his father to a Ku Klux Klan lynching in 1937, passed through an orphanage and relatives in Pittsburgh, and lied about his age...

In the early 1990s Atlantic Records offered Ruthie Foster a lucrative deal to become the next pop star, and she walked out the door. Born in 1964 in rural Texas into a gospel family, she was a featured church soloist by 14, studied music and audio engineering at McLennan Community College in Waco while fronting a blues band, then joined the Navy and sang funk and pop in the recruitment band Pride....

Going Up the Country is the sunny anthem of Woodstock, but the band that played it was drowning in drug busts, smuggling and death. Canned Heat began in 1965 in Topanga Canyon when record collectors Bob Hite and Alan Wilson formed a jug band to play the 1920s blues they studied, took their name from a 1928 song about drinking Sterno, and added guitarist Henry Vestine, fresh from being fired by Fra...

Angela Strehli did not just sing in the Austin blues scene; she helped build it. Born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1945, she taught herself bass guitar and harmonica before ever stepping up to a microphone, then took a 1966 trip to Chicago to see Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy in their electric element. Back in Texas she formed the Fabulous Rockets with Lewis Cowdery, sang backup for James Pol...

Ann Peebles had one of the most distinctive voices in Memphis soul and one of the biggest hits of the 1970s, then stepped away from the industry at the height of the disco era to prioritize her family. Born Ann Lee Peebles on April 27, 1947, in Kinloch, Missouri, the seventh of eleven children, she learned to sing in her father's church with the family's group, the Peebles Choir, which opened show...

In the early 1960s, when women in rhythm and blues were expected to stand at the microphone and sing other people's songs, a left-handed teenager from Beaumont, Texas, took the stage with an electric guitar flipped upside down and a number-one hit she wrote herself. Barbara Lynn, born in 1942, grew up singing in a Catholic parish choir while absorbing Guitar Slim, Jimmy Reed, Elvis Presley, and Br...

The popular image of a 1930s Mississippi bluesman is a solitary figure pouring sorrow into a battered guitar, but one of the era's most prolific and commercially successful artists packed juke joints with clever, wink-and-nudge double entendres. This episode explores the life of Bo Carter, born around 1893 or 1894 in Bolton, Mississippi, into a musical family: his father Henderson, a former slave,...

Bobby Charles wrote one of the most famous catchphrases in rock and roll, penned hits for his idol Fats Domino, performed at The Last Waltz, and still remained almost invisible to the public. Born in Abbeville, Louisiana, in 1938, he grew up on traditional Cajun music and the country storytelling of Hank Williams until, at fifteen, a Fats Domino performance rewired his sense of rhythm. Fusing Caju...

Chris Smither's life shatters the expected bluesman origin story. Born in Miami in November 1944 to a father who was a professor of Spanish and Mexican culture and an uncle who was an award-winning musicologist, he lived in Ecuador, the Rio Grande Valley, New Orleans, and Paris, where his father brought him his first guitar from Spain. He won a New Orleans folk battle of the bands in 1960 and enro...