pplpod

Auburn "Pat" Hare was born December 20, 1930 in Cherry Valley, Arkansas, and by the early 1950s he was a sought-after sideman in Memphis, recording at Sun Studio and backing Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Bobby Bland. In 1954, on James Cotton's Cotton Crop Blues and its B-side Hold Me in Your Arms, he pushed a small Sears and Roebuck amplifier far past its limit to produce a tearing, clipped tone...

Willie "Big Eyes" Smith was born in Helena, Arkansas in January 1936, migrated to Chicago, and taught himself harmonica at 17, an unusually late start for a professional. By 1955 his harp playing landed him on Bo Diddley's Diddy Wah Diddy for the Checker label, a Chess Records subsidiary. Then he made a pivot that looks like career sabotage on paper: he switched to drums to play on Muddy Waters Si...

The chugging train rhythm of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues feels like it was pulled straight out of the American soil, but its musical backbone traces to a piano instrumental by Little Brother Montgomery, an African-American and Creek Indian blues musician born in 1906 in the sawmill town of Kentwood, Louisiana. Montgomery started playing piano at four, largely teaching himself while Jelly Rol...

Harding "Hop" Wilson was born in Grapeland, Texas in April 1921, earned his nickname from playing harmonica so incessantly that "Harp" slurred into "Hop," and as a teenager picked up the steel guitar that would define his legacy. This episode explores how a young Black musician in the segregated 1930s South absorbed two separate worlds, the raw acoustic Texas blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson and the...

William Weldon cut more than 60 sides for Vocalion and Bluebird between 1927 and 1940, scored solo hits, and anchored sessions for Teddy Darby, Bumble Bee Slim and Peetie Wheatstraw. Then history deleted him: his birth date is disputed between February 2, 1901 and December 10, 1909, his identity was merged with a different musician, he was credited with marriages that never happened, and his grave...

Michael Burks was born in Milwaukee in 1957 into three generations of blues: a grandfather who played Delta blues and a father, Frederick Burks, who played bass alongside Sonny Boy Williamson II. He had a guitar in his hands by age five, and in the early 1970s, after the family moved to Camden, Arkansas, he and his father built a 300-seat juke joint by hand, the Bradley Ferry Country Club, where M...

Between Blind Blake's final recordings around 1932 and Blind Boy Fuller's debut in 1935, Piedmont blues changed dramatically, and Eugene "Buddy" Moss is the missing link that explains why. Born into a sharecropping family of 12 children in Jewell, Georgia, with a birth year debated between 1906 and 1914, Moss taught himself harmonica by immersion, busked on Atlanta's Decatur Street by 1928, and wa...

Gray's Anatomy is spoken of in medical schools with hushed reverence, yet the man behind the name died at 34 before seeing any of its legacy. Henry Gray was born in Belgravia, London in 1827 and entered St George's Hospital as a medical student around 1842, at roughly 15 years old. This episode paints the visceral reality of 1840s medical training, where students avoided the unrefrigerated chaos o...

Everyone knows the black suits, thin ties and sunglasses of the Blues Brothers, but far fewer know the Pacific Northwest musician who inspired them. Curtis Salgado was born in Everett, Washington in 1954 and rose through the Eugene, Oregon scene fronting the Nighthawks before spending six years co-fronting the Robert Cray Band on vocals and harmonica, featured on Cray's 1980 debut before parting w...

In 1970 Ten Years After released a single that forced listeners to change their turntable speed: a three-minute edit of Love Like a Man at 45 rpm on one side and a sprawling live jam at 33 rpm on the other. This episode treats the band as a living organism and traces its messy birth in the Nottingham and Mansfield areas of the early 1960s, through names like Ivan Jay and the Jaycats, the Jaybirds,...

When Edwin Joseph Bocage, known as Eddie Bo, died of a heart attack in Picayune, Mississippi in 2009 at 78, his body was cremated almost immediately on the order of a woman claiming to be his sister, a stranger to his actual siblings. It was a bizarre final chapter for a man who released more singles than anyone in New Orleans history except Fats Domino. This episode frames Bo as a master builder...

A teenage soldier named Jimi Hendrix used to sneak off his base, risking court martial, to watch a guitarist command the stage in the Pacific Northwest. That guitarist was David William Kearney, better known as Guitar Shorty, and within a decade he would be wiping grease off his hands as a daytime mechanic. This episode traces the staggering gap between innovation and industry survival, starting w...

In 1987 John Cephas was named Entertainer of the Year at the W.C. Handy Awards, then went back to his day job framing walls as a carpenter at the D.C. National Armory. This episode tells the story of Cephas, born in 1930 and raised in rural Bowling Green, Virginia, and Phil Wiggins, born in 1954 in urban Washington, D.C., two musicians 24 years apart who met by chance at a jam session during the 1...

What kind of band writes a song that Frank Sinatra, Howlin' Wolf, the Grateful Dead, Bob Wills, Cream and Jack White could all cover? The answer is the Mississippi Sheiks, a 1930s guitar and fiddle group from Bolton, Mississippi, built around the Chatmon family. This episode starts with patriarch Henderson Chatmon, who lived during slavery and earned the distinction of a "musicianer," someone who...

Imagine scoring a number one R&B hit and then spending the rest of your life being confused with another gospel-trained singer who shares nearly your exact name and who recorded a cover of your biggest song. That was the reality for Johnny Lamont Merrett, known as Little Johnny Taylor. Born in February 1943 in Gregory, Arkansas, he moved to Los Angeles in 1950 and trained his voice in the Migh...

Kelly Joe Phelps (1959-2022) spent a full decade playing upright bass in the wild, unstructured world of free jazz before walking away to reinvent himself as an acoustic lap-style slide guitarist and singer-songwriter. This deep dive traces how a kid from the blue-collar farming town of Sumner, Washington, whose father started him on drums and piano before he ever touched a guitar at age 12, absor...

What happens when you type a name into a massive global database and the system cannot decide which person you mean? This deep dive uses a single Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name Philip Walker as a framework for understanding how history, culture and digital information get categorized. Three wildly different American legacies share the same text string: Philip Walker the American blues...

Charles Isaiah Ross, known to the world as Dr. Ross or the Harmonica Boss, won a Grammy, toured Europe as a one-man band, and had his song Cat Squirrel covered by Cream and Jethro Tull on their debut albums. Yet for nearly 40 years, right up until the day he died, he was clocking in on the assembly line at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. This deep dive traces his path from a farming fam...

Playing amplified blues harmonica at a professional level is a physically punishing act, and for William Clarke (1951-1996) that toll caught up with him on a stage in Indianapolis in the mid-1990s. This deep dive follows the Inglewood, California native who picked up the harmonica in 1967 at 16 and threw himself straight into the Los Angeles club scene, building a musical toolkit that fused aggres...

In 1960 a farm boy raised in Elliott, Iowa arrived at the University of Chicago on a National Merit Scholarship to study physics. Instead of a laboratory career, Elvin Bishop walked into the electric blues clubs of Chicago's South Side, met harmonica player Paul Butterfield in Hyde Park in 1963, and helped form the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. This deep dive traces how an analytical mind found the...

Etta Baker said her musical inspiration came to her in dreams, and she kept a relationship with the guitar for nearly 90 years, starting at age three. Born Etta Lucille Reed in Caldwell County, North Carolina in 1913, she learned entirely by ear from her father Boone Reed, mastering the six-string guitar, the 12-string guitar and the five-string banjo. This deep dive explains what makes Piedmont b...

Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 61, the final chapter of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which Austen distributes futures to the whole cast with one last round of perfectly aimed sentences. The double wedding empties Longbourn of sense, and life sorts itself acc...

With everything settled, Elizabeth wants only one thing more: an accounting. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 60 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the victory lap, in which the engaged couple audit their own love story and the letters announcing it fly out of Longbourn in every direction. How could he begin, she demands: what set him off? Darcy cannot fix the hour, or the spot...

"My dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?" This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 59 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the hardest part of getting engaged to Mr. Darcy turns out to be convincing anyone it could possibly be true. Jane hears it first, in the old room at night, and flatly refuses to believe it: engaged to Mr. Darcy, whom Elizabeth dislikes beyond any...

Darcy comes back from London with Bingley, a walking party sets out toward Lucas Lodge, and the pairs fall into place until Elizabeth finds herself beside the one man she has everything to say to. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 58 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: the second proposal, and the conversation the whole novel has been building toward. Elizabeth spends her courage...