pplpod

Chris Thomas King played the soul-selling bluesman on screen, and then wrote a book arguing that the crossroads legend and the Mississippi Delta origin story are wrong. Born Derwood Christopher Thomas in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1962, he was the son of traditional blues musician Tabby Thomas, who ran a famous local club. Rather than preserve his father's music in amber, he dragged it into the hi...

A teenager expelled from a theological seminary for playing ragtime piano went on to build the rhythmic engine of boogie-woogie and, decades later, the sound that unlocked Ray Charles. Charles Edward Davenport was born in Anniston, Alabama, in 1894, one of eight children, and started playing piano around age twelve over the objections of a father who sent him to seminary to cleanse the urge. After...

Curley Weaver recorded for Columbia, Decca, and OKeh during the first commercial explosion of the blues, and still woke before dawn for manual labor and busked on Atlanta street corners to eat. Born March 25, 1906, in Covington, Georgia, and raised on a farm in Porterdale, he learned guitar from his mother, Savannah 'Dip' Weaver, a respected pianist and guitarist who also taught his friends Charli...

In 1962, a 22-year-old from a Texas bar band cornered John Lennon backstage at a UK club and gave him a harmonica lesson, and for Delbert McClinton that was barely the prologue. Born in Lubbock in 1940 and raised in Fort Worth from age eleven, he came up in the Straitjackets, a roadhouse band that backed touring giants like Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Jimmy Reed....

Dinah Washington could walk into a Las Vegas venue unannounced, claim the stage, and draw every performer on the strip to watch her work. This episode views her life through the lens of rebellion against categorization. Born Ruth Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1924, she moved to Chicago with her family as a child, played piano for the choir at St. Luke's Baptist Church while still in element...

Doyle Bramhall II plays a guitar flipped over for a left-hander with the strings left in place, so the thinnest string sits at the top and every bend has to be pulled toward the floor. This episode argues that his counterintuitive technique mirrors an entire career built on flipping a suffocating legacy on its head. Born in Dallas in 1968, he is the son of Doyle Bramhall Sr., a songwriter and drum...

Picture a smoky late-1960s London club where the wall of rhythm and blues coming off the stage is produced by a single person: a bass drum pedal under his foot, a harmonica in a rack around his neck, and a vintage gold-top guitar in his hands. This episode traces the life of Anthony 'Duster' Bennett, born September 23, 1946, in Welshpool, Powys, who came up through the art school scenes of Kingsto...

Earl Hooker's warm-up instrumental was secretly recorded, sold to Chess Records, and released with Muddy Waters' vocals pasted over it as You Shook Me. Then he went back and did it again on purpose. Born in 1930 near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and raised in Chicago after his family joined the Great Migration, Hooker was a cousin of John Lee Hooker, picked up the guitar around age ten, and, because o...

At twelve years old, Eddie C. Campbell was standing in the shadows of Chicago blues clubs watching the hands of Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, and Otis Rush. Born in Duncan, Mississippi, on May 6, 1939, he moved with his family to Chicago in 1949, arriving with a decade of the acoustic rural South in his memory just as the electric West Side sound was being invented. This episode explains how plugging i...

When Eric Bibb was eleven and learning guitar, a family friend leaned over and told him to drop the flashy techniques and keep it simple. That friend was Bob Dylan. Born in New York City in the summer of 1951, Bibb was the son of folk and musical theater figure Leon Bibb, the nephew of Modern Jazz Quartet founder John Lewis, and the godson of Paul Robeson, with Pete Seeger among the regular visito...

Floyd Dixon branded himself Mr. Magnificent, and this episode traces how the Texas-born pianist earned it. Born February 8, 1929 in Marshall, Texas, Dixon absorbed blues, gospel, jazz and country before his family moved to Los Angeles in 1942, where the smooth club style of Charles Brown became his template. After gigging with Eddie Williams and His Brown Buddies, he signed with Modern Records in...

Floyd Jones wrote a song that Canned Heat carried into the Billboard top 10 in 1968, yet when he died in 1989 the Chicago Tribune noted how little attention his passing received. This episode traces the bluesman from his birth in Marianna, Arkansas in July 1917 through an itinerant life in the Delta, where Howlin' Wolf handed him a guitar, to his 1945 arrival in Chicago as part of the Great Migrat...

John Thurman Hunter Jr. was working in a Beaumont, Texas box factory when he saw B.B. King perform, bought his first guitar, and in that same year of 1953 released a single on Duke Records as Long John Hunter. This episode explains how that seemingly impossible timeline made sense in the raw, volume-driven R&B market run by Don Robey, and follows Hunter from his birth on July 13, 1931 in Ringg...

John Cephas was born in 1930 and raised in Bowling Green, Virginia; Phil Wiggins was born in 1954 in Washington, DC. Separated by 24 years, they met at a 1976 jam session at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife and, after an incubation period in pianist Big Chief Ellis's band, decided to continue as an acoustic guitar and harmonica duo. This episode breaks down what Piedmont blues actua...

William Big Bill Morganfield is the son of McKinley Morganfield, known to the world as Muddy Waters, but this episode is about the decades he spent refusing the shortcut that name offered. Born in Chicago in 1956 and raised in southern Florida by his grandmother, Morganfield grew up on the Jackson 5 and James Brown, earned an English degree from Tuskegee and a communications degree from Auburn, an...

Roebuck Pops Staples scored a Billboard number one pop hit the day before he turned 61, and this episode traces the life that made such a late peak possible. Born in December 1914 near Winona, Mississippi, the youngest of 14 children, he grew up on a cotton plantation near Drew with an eighth-grade education, absorbing the guitar language of Delta neighbors like Charley Patton while choosing the g...

Allen George Smith learned the harmonica from his mother at age four and spent his teens playing in a country band and a Mississippi gospel group before hitting a problem every street musician faced in the 1940s: nobody could hear him. This episode follows George Harmonica Smith from his birth on April 22, 1924 in West Helena, Arkansas and his upbringing in Cairo, Illinois to Rock Island, Illinois...

In 1981 George Thorogood played all 50 US states in 50 days, squeezing in Washington, DC and Maryland on the same day for 51 shows. This episode uses that tour as a lens on a career built on physical stamina rather than trends. Born in February 1950 in Wilmington, Delaware, Thorogood played semi-professional baseball before a guitar slide gift and a 1970 John Hammond concert redirected him toward...

Graham Bond taught Deep Purple's Jon Lord the organ, suggested the name The Animals, employed Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and John McLaughlin before they were famous, and was the first rock artist to record with a Mellotron. This episode asks why a resume like that ended in obscurity. Born in 1937 in Romford, Essex and adopted from a Dr. Barnardo's home, Bond rose through the British jazz scene on sa...

In the early 1960s an elderly Gus Cannon pawned his banjo to pay a heating bill. Months later the Rooftop Singers took his song Walk Right In to number one, and he bought the banjo back. This episode traces the full arc behind that reversal, beginning on the Henderson Newell plantation in Red Banks, Mississippi, where records list his birth as 1883 while his tombstone says 1874. Sharecropping in C...

Guy Davis learned fingerpicking on a train from Boston to New York by watching the hands of a stranger with nine fingers. This episode explores how the only son of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, born in 1952 in the New York City area, absorbed the rural South through his grandmother's speech and family stories, learned five-string banjo at a Vermont camp run by John Seeger, and refused formal lessons i...

Hammie Nixon, born in 1908 in Brownsville, Tennessee, came up in the 1920s jug band scene playing kazoo, guitar and the jug itself, and this episode argues that those years taught him something that changed blues music. Playing jug meant buzzing your lips into a vessel to supply a syncopated bass line and lock the tempo, and Nixon carried that rhythmic thinking to the harmonica. Instead of using t...

In 1956, while charismatic vocalists dominated rock and roll, an instrumental called Honky Tonk sat atop the Billboard R&B chart for more than two months, sold four million copies and peaked at number two on the pop chart. This episode explains how Bill Doggett engineered that hit. Born William Ballard Doggett in Philadelphia in 1916, he spent the 1930s and early 1940s writing arrangements for...

At the closing ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, with roughly three billion people watching, Stanley Dural Jr. stood at the center of the broadcast strapped to a 30-pound piano accordion playing Louisiana Creole dance music. This episode traces how Buckwheat Zydeco got there, starting in Lafayette in 1947 as one of 13 children picking cotton at age five, ignoring his father's traditional Creo...

In 1971 one of the biggest hits on the national R&B chart was produced, owned and controlled by a Black woman who had picked cotton in rural Mississippi a few decades earlier. This episode follows Denise LaSalle from her birth in July 1934 in LeFlore County, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers, through gospel choirs in Belzoni and a move to Chicago at 13 in the middle of the Great...