pplpod

The Bennet girls' prospects come with fine print: Longbourn is entailed away to a distant cousin, and their mother never forgets it. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 7 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which a militia regiment settles into Meryton for the winter and a dinner invitation becomes a campaign of Mrs. Bennet's own devising. Kitty and Lydia now walk to Meryton dai...

While the whole neighborhood watches Jane and Bingley, nobody at all is watching Mr. Darcy, which is exactly how he gets into trouble. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 6 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the man who found nothing tolerable at the assembly starts listening for one particular voice. At a party at Lucas Lodge, Charlotte gives Elizabeth her cool theory of...

Within a short walk of Longbourn lives the family the Bennets gossip with most freely. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 5 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the Lucases and the Bennets hold a post-mortem on the assembly and the word "pride" gets its first full airing. Sir William Lucas, knighted during his year as mayor and devoted ever since to the memory of St. James...

The ball is over and the real conversation begins. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 4 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which Jane and Elizabeth compare notes in private and the narrator quietly takes the measure of the whole Netherfield party. Jane confesses her admiration of Bingley: sensible, good-humoured, lively, everything a young man ought to be. Elizabeth approves t...

Mr. Bingley finally appears in person, and Meryton gets its first look at the man from Netherfield along with the friend he brought down with him. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 3 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: the Meryton assembly, the ball where the whole novel picks its sides. Bingley proves everything the neighborhood hoped: handsome, easy, delighted with everybody, a...

Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He had always intended to go; he simply preferred that his wife believe otherwise. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 2 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the call Mrs. Bennet spent Chapter 1 begging for has quietly already happened, and the only question is how much fun her husband can have revealing...

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." So begins Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and so begins this episode: the complete audiobook of Chapter 1, in which one piece of neighborhood news sets the entire novel in motion. Netherfield Park is let at last, and Mrs. Bennet has every detail. The new tenant is Mr. Bingley,...

Albert Collins, the Master of the Telecaster and the Iceman, built one of the most recognizable guitar sounds in blues history by breaking nearly every conventional rule. This episode traces his journey from Leona, Texas, where a booked-up piano tutor led a cousin to hand him a guitar tuned to open F minor, through twelve years of ranch work and truck driving while he honed his craft at Houston ja...

Albert King, the Velvet Bulldozer, was born Albert Nelson in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1923, picked cotton as a child in Arkansas, and built his first instrument from a cigar box, a piece of a bush, and a strand of broom wire. Left-handed and unable to find a left-handed guitar, he simply flipped a right-handed instrument upside down without restringing it, a choice that inverted the entire fretb...

Alberta Hunter spent twenty years as a hospital nurse before a mandatory retirement at what her paperwork said was age 70 pushed her out the door. She was actually 82, and soon she was performing at a Greenwich Village nightclub and signing with Columbia Records. This episode traces how a girl who fled Memphis for Chicago alone at age 11 went from peeling potatoes in a boarding house to singing wi...

Alexis Korner, often called the father of British blues, first heard the music that would define his life inside a London air raid shelter during a German bombing run in the early 1940s, when someone played a record by pianist Jimmy Yancey. Born in Paris in 1928 to an Austrian Jewish father and a mother of Greek, Turkish, and Austrian heritage, he had already lived as a refugee in France, Switzerl...

Alvin Youngblood Hart, born Gregory Edward Hart in Oakland, California, on March 6, 1963, seemed destined by geography for psychedelic rock or funk. Instead he became one of the most authentic torchbearers of deep Mississippi country blues. This episode traces the two environments that shaped him: the urban energy of Oakland and the formative time he spent in Carroll County, Mississippi, where old...

Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, was the highest paid Black entertainer of her era and traveled in a custom-built 72-foot private railroad car. Yet after her death in 1937 she lay in an unmarked grave for more than thirty years, until Janis Joplin and a woman who had once done Smith's housework paid for a headstone in 1970. This episode maps her journey from busking outside the White Elepha...

Beth Hart won Star Search in 1993, landed a major label deal with Atlantic Records, and scored a hit when LA Song reached the top ten of the adult contemporary chart and appeared on Beverly Hills, 90210. Then addiction and untreated bipolar disorder cost her everything, and Atlantic dropped her. This episode follows the Los Angeles-born singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from classical...

In late 1938, producer John Hammond needed a raw Delta bluesman to replace the recently deceased Robert Johnson at his From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. He called Big Bill Broonzy, expecting a rustic country performer. What he got was a sophisticated urban pioneer already laying the groundwork for electric Chicago blues. This episode unpacks the life of a musical chameleon whose b...

In the late 1920s, a 12-year-old with a penciled-on mustache and his father's oversized fedora tended bar in Kansas City nightclubs while singing over a dozen blaring brass instruments. That kid was Big Joe Turner, and this episode argues that following his life traces the mechanical blueprint of American rock and roll. From the Kingfish Club and Piney Brown's Sunset, where police raids were so ro...

Big Maceo Merriweather's debut record, Worried Life Blues, was chosen for the inaugural class of the Blues Hall of Fame alongside Sweet Home Chicago and Hellhound on My Trail, and Eric Clapton regularly covers it in concert. Yet the man who recorded it lay in an unmarked grave in Warren, Michigan, for 55 years. This episode traces how a self-taught pianist born Major Merriweather in Newnan, Georgi...

Elvis Presley's Hound Dog and Janis Joplin's Ball and Chain seem to come from different musical universes, but the blueprint for both was drawn by the same self-taught Black woman from rural Alabama: Willie Mae Big Mama Thornton. This episode examines how the daughter of a minister and a church singer, who dropped out of school after her mother died of tuberculosis and washed spittoons in a tavern...

Two years before Jerry Lee Lewis recorded Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On, Big Maybelle laid down a version produced by a young Quincy Jones that established the song's rhythmic and attitude blueprint. This episode explores the life of Mabel Louise Smith, born in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1924, who started singing gospel in church, made her professional debut at age 12 with Dave Clark's Memphis Band, an...

Big Walter Horton was so shy his peers nicknamed him Mumbles, yet when he raised a harmonica to his lips the sound was so bold that Willie Dixon called him the best he had ever heard. This episode traces how a kid from Horn Lake, Mississippi, born in 1921 and out of school by age seven, went from blowing into discarded tin cans on a porch to shaping the modern Chicago blues sound, largely from the...

Arthur Blake, known to the world as Blind Blake, was a guitar genius who mapped the independent left-hand and right-hand roles of ragtime piano onto six strings, laid the blueprint for Piedmont blues, and recorded roughly 80 tracks for Paramount Records between 1926 and 1932. Then he vanished so completely that fellow musicians invented stories of a streetcar accident or a fatal Chicago blizzard,...

In 1945, a blind and gravely ill man shivered in the charred ruins of his burned house in Beaumont, Texas, reportedly turned away from a local hospital, and died within days in poverty. Thirty-two years later, his voice was etched onto the Voyager Golden Record and launched toward interstellar space as one of humanity's chosen representatives. This episode explores the life of Blind Willie Johnson...

In 1983, Warner Bros. dropped Bonnie Raitt the day after she finished mastering her album Tongue and Groove, then shelved the record entirely. She was in her thirties, battling alcohol and drug addiction, and touring on her own savings. Six years later, Nick of Time hit number one, swept the Grammys including Album of the Year, and sold more than five million copies in the United States. This epis...

Buddy Guy was born in 1936 to sharecropping parents in Lettsworth, Louisiana, picking cotton for $2.50 per hundred pounds and coaxing his first notes from a diddley bow made of baling wire and a glass bottle. This episode traces his path from working as a custodian at Louisiana State University while playing Baton Rouge clubs, to his arrival in Chicago in September 1957, where he won a 1958 guitar...

Carey Bell was born on November 14, 1936 in Macon, Mississippi, a boy obsessed with Louis Jordan who wanted a saxophone his family could not afford. Handed a harmonica instead, the so-called Mississippi saxophone, he taught himself to make it wail like a horn by studying DeFord Bailey, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter and both Sonny Boy Williamsons. He was proficient by age eight and working profe...