pplpod

Nick Moss, born in Chicago in 1969, started his professional life as a teenage bass player behind Buddy Scott and Jimmy Dawkins, learning to hold down the pocket rather than show off. In 1993 he joined the Legendary Blues Band and played bass on their final album Money Talks, and it was frontman Willie Big Eyes Smith, the longtime Muddy Waters drummer, who told him he needed to move to lead guitar...

Bob Seger's 1981 hit Trying to Live My Life Without You was a cover. The original, released in late 1972 on Hi Records, belonged to Otis Clay, a singer born February 11, 1942, in Waxhaw, Mississippi, whose family joined the Great Migration north in 1953. This episode traces how a young man trained in the gospel groups of Muncie, Indiana, and Chicago built the blueprint for modern soul and became a...

Phil Guy jammed with Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead on a train across Canada, recorded dozens of his own records, embraced funk and soul in the 1970s, and helped build the rhythmic backbone of modern Chicago blues. Yet his obituary still led with the fact that he was Buddy Guy's little brother. This episode looks past the family tree to understand what Phil Guy, born in April 1940 in Lettswort...

Imagine a room where a medieval English priest sits next to the frontman of a modern funk and soul band. They have nothing in common except that when you call the name Robert Randolph, they both stand up. This episode takes an unusual source, a Wikipedia disambiguation page, and turns a dry list of links into an exploration of how history overlaps, how names travel, and how the digital infrastruct...

Around 1900 in Mississippi, a three-year-old laid a guitar flat on the floorboards and crawled underneath it to figure out how the machine worked. That boy was Sam Chatmon, born in 1897 in Bolton, Mississippi, into a family string band with roots going back to slavery and possibly a half-brother of Delta blues father Charlie Patton. This episode follows a street-corner musician who survived obscur...

Silas Hogan got his big break at 51 and was back in a hard hat at an oil refinery three years later, not because audiences left him but because two executives had a falling out. Born in 1911 in Westover, Louisiana, Hogan picked up the guitar as a teenager, gigged from the late 1930s, relocated to Baton Rouge in the early 1950s, and did not sign his first record deal until 1962. This episode looks...

Eric Clapton has called him one of the most advanced guitarists on the planet and one of the most underappreciated. Clyde Vernon Landreth, known as Sonny Landreth, was born in early 1951 in Canton, Mississippi, and grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the heart of Cajun and Creole country. This episode explores how a young slide guitarist joined Clifton Chenier's Red Hot Louisiana Band as its only...

A special education teacher in mid-1970s Boston and a four-time Blues Music Award-winning guitarist who traded solos with Gregg Allman in sold-out arenas are the same person. Ronald Horvath, known as Ronnie Earl, was born in 1953 in Queens, studied American history at C.W. Post before transferring to Boston University, graduated in 1975, and went to work teaching children with disabilities. Then h...

How does a teenage girl from Ottawa, Canada become one of the most decorated electric blues guitarists in Texas and then earn a PhD in musicology? This deep dive traces the extraordinary path of Sue Foley, born March 29, 1968, who picked up the guitar at 13 after falling for the Rolling Stones, played her first professional gig at 16 with Back Alley John, and moved to Vancouver after graduation to...

In 2023, a 74-year-old blues legend walked across a stage in Colorado to receive the high school diploma his school denied him 57 years earlier for refusing to cut his hair. That refusal to compromise defines the life of Otis Taylor, born in Chicago in 1948 and raised in Denver, who first fell for the banjo before learning its African origins had been twisted through blackface minstrelsy and absor...

Picture a European blues festival in the 1990s where a man in his late 60s marches out in a glowing neon wig and pounds the piano like a teenager with something to prove. That was Robert Purcell Ferguson, better known as H-Bomb Ferguson, born May 9, 1929 in Charleston County, South Carolina, the 11th of 12 children of a strict Baptist preacher. His father paid for piano lessons on the condition he...

In the late 1950s, a New Orleans songwriter named Dorothy LaBostrie heard a voice drifting up through her floorboards from the apartment below, where Laten John Adams Jr. was singing in the bathtub. She knocked on his door and convinced the gospel singer to go secular, launching the career of Johnny Adams, The Tan Canary, a vocalist with a multi-octave range and a falsetto that masked the break be...

Only one politician has ever defeated Barack Obama in an election, and he began his public life by going AWOL from the US Army to co-found the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. This deep dive traces the chronological arc of a Chicago South Side figure born in 1946 in Albany, Georgia, who came north with his mother in the Great Migration, dropped out of high school to join the Army in 1963, j...

A shotgun blast to the face destroyed his eyes in the 1920s, yet street lore says Blind Joe Reynolds could aim and fire a pistol by sound alone. This deep dive pieces together the fractured biography of a transient Delta bluesman whose birth year bounces between 1900 and 1904, whose birthplace is listed as both Tallulah, Louisiana and Arkansas, and who performed under aliases like Joe Sheppard and...

Imagine flying to Europe to share stages with Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, then clocking in at dawn at a Chicago folding box factory. That was the life of Byther Smith, born in Monticello, Mississippi in April 1932, orphaned young and raised by his aunt and uncle on gospel music. As a teenager he moved to Arizona to work cattle ranches and construction, learned double bass from country and weste...

For decades the Delta bluesman known as King Solomon Hill was a ghost. Big Joe Williams falsely claimed the recordings as his own early work, a claim published in Samuel Charters' The Country Blues, and other enthusiasts guessed the singer was actually Sam Collins. This deep dive follows scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow, whose findings were contested by David Evans, as he carried cassette tapes to front...

How does a kid banging drums in the burning 1970s Bronx, who later played guitar behind punk pioneer Richard Hell, become a blues titan whose battered 1966 Stratocaster gets replicated by a guitar manufacturer? This deep dive traces the life of Theodore Joseph Horowitz, born March 31, 1960, known to the world as Popa Chubby. Starting on drums at 13 and moving to guitar after discovering the Rollin...

A teenager from Brooklyn picks up the harmonica at 12, turns professional at 15 with Little Jimmy May, and a few years later is living in a basement on Chicago's South Side with pianist Otis Spann while playing every night in the Muddy Waters band. This deep dive tells the story of Paul Oscher, born in February 1947, who studied the lead-instrument style of John Lee Sonny Boy Williamson and got hi...

Born in Mobile, Alabama in April 1867, just two years after the Civil War ended, Johnny Watson was still recording in 1960, the year the Beatles were forming. Known as Daddy Stovepipe for the tall hat that made him instantly recognizable on Chicago's Maxwell Street, he may be the earliest-born blues performer ever captured on record. This deep dive follows a musical chameleon who played 12-string...

In the early 1940s a woman in a flour-dusted apron handed bread to customers at a Chicago bakery, earning enough to feed her seven children. None of them knew she had recorded with Louis Armstrong and helped build the foundation of the blues. This deep dive traces the life of Bertha Chippie Hill, born in 1905, one of 16 children, from either Charleston, South Carolina or Pratt City, Alabama depend...

One of the most swaggering tracks on Van Halen's 1978 debut was not written in a California studio. It was composed 25 years earlier by John Charles Brim, a self-taught guitarist born April 10, 1922 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, who learned by ear from scratchy shellac records of Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red. This deep dive follows Brim and his wife Grace, a drummer and harmonica player, from India...

Novelty songs in 1942 joked about his waistline, yet critics said his voice sounded like high society theater. This deep dive explores the contradictions of James Andrew Rushing, born August 1901 in Oklahoma City to a musical family whose father locked the piano and bought him a violin instead. His mother slipped him the key whenever his father walked down the street, and unlike most blues peers,...

A blues musician with a master's degree in history who spent 30 years hauling hazardous waste in an 18-wheeler and once tried to farm artichokes in Oklahoma. This deep dive follows William P. Homans III, better known as Watermelon Slim, born in Boston in 1949 to a prominent civil rights lawyer, raised partly in North Carolina, and enrolled at Middlebury College before dropping out to enlist for Vi...

Forget the 1950s diner and the jukebox. This deep dive argues the blueprint of rock and roll was laid down in 1929 by a nearly blind teenage guitarist in the Jim Crow South. Lemoyne Roosevelt Graves, born December 9, 1909 in Rose Hill or Summerland, Mississippi, and his younger brother Uaroy, born around 1912, were both nearly blind, and in a rural economy built on field labor, music was one of th...

The Groundhogs began in 1962 in New Cross, London, as The Dollar Bills, built around Calcutta-born brothers John and Peter Cruickshank. When guitarist Tony McPhee joined, he steered the band toward the blues and renamed it after John Lee Hooker's Groundhog Blues. Within two years they were backing Hooker on his 1964 UK tour, then supporting Little Walter, Jimmy Reed and Champion Jack Dupree. This...