pplpod

Cedric Burnside was born in Memphis on August 26, 1978 and raised in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in the home of his grandfather R.L. Burnside, with his father Calvin Jackson already an established blues drummer. By age 13 he was touring the world behind his grandfather's band, eventually taking over the drum stool from his own father. This episode explains what makes Hill Country blues mechanicall...

Charley Patton stood about five feet five inches tall, yet his gravelly voice was reputed to carry the length of five football fields without a microphone, and he played guitar behind his head and behind his back decades before rock and roll existed. This episode reconstructs the slippery historical record of the man called the father of the Delta blues: a birth year most often given as April 1891...

Clifton Chenier was born in June 1925 in Leonville, Louisiana, a French-speaking farm kid who shadowed his sharecropper father Joseph at Creole dances where the diatonic button accordion and his uncle's fiddle ruled. This episode explains how the radio pulled his ear toward the electric blues of Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins and Peetie Wheatstraw, and how, after long shifts at a Gulf oil refiner...

Coco Montoya is left-handed, but he plays a guitar strung for a right-handed player, which means every string is upside down: his downstrokes hit the thin high strings first and he bends notes by pulling toward the floor instead of pushing toward the ceiling. Born on October 2, 1951 in Santa Monica, California, he did not begin his professional career as a guitarist at all. In the mid-1970s he was...

Corey Harris was born in Denver, Colorado and earned a degree from Bates College in Maine, a geographic footprint that shatters the usual map of acoustic blues. Rather than moving to Nashville or New York after graduating in 1991, he went to Cameroon on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study language, then took a Teach for America job in Napoleonville, Louisiana. This episode argues that he revers...

Eddie Boyd was born in November 1914 on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta, either Stovall's near Clarksdale or Frank Moore's next door, and even his name is uncertain: officially Edward Riley Boyd, possibly Will Joe Boyd Jr. Influenced by the driving piano of Leroy Carr and Roosevelt Sykes, he played Beale Street in Memphis with the Dixie Rhythm Boys in the 1930s before joining the Great Migra...

Eddie Taylor was born on January 29, 1923 in Benoit, Mississippi and taught himself guitar by watching the hands of older players on porches and in juke joints around Leland. Before he ever left the Delta, he taught his friend Jimmy Reed how to play, inverting the usual hierarchy of star and sideman. This episode follows Taylor's 1948 move to Chicago, where amplification broadcast every dropped be...

Elmore James was born in 1918 in Richland, Mississippi, in Holmes County, to a 15-year-old mother, Leola Brooks, and took his surname from Joe Willie Frost James. By age 12 he was making music on a diddley bow, a single piece of wire stretched tight and nailed to the wooden siding of a shack, with a glass bottle wedged underneath as a bridge. This episode explains how that one-string instrument fo...

Eric Gales was born in Memphis in October 1974 and picked up the guitar at four, learning from his older brothers Eugene and Manuel, known as Little Jimmy King. Because the brother who taught him was left-handed, the right-handed Eric mirrored what he saw, flipping a standard guitar over without restringing it, so the heavy bass string sits nearest the floor. This episode explains how that upside-...

Esther Phillips was born Esther Mae Jones and split her childhood between her father in Houston and her mother in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, building a vocal foundation in the church choir. In 1949, at 14, her sister pushed her into an amateur talent show at the Barrelhouse Club, where bandleader Johnny Otis was so stunned that he recorded her immediately, added her to his traveling re...

Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles to a 14-year-old mother and a father who was never officially identified, though she later explored rumors that he was the billiards player Minnesota Fats. Raised by a series of foster parents, she began singing in a Baptist church choir at five, where choir director James Earl Hines punched her in the chest to force her voice from her gut, and...

In 1963, a young blues scout named Tom Hoskins drove from Washington, D.C. to a wooden cabin in Avalon, Mississippi and asked a 70-something sharecropper to pick up a guitar and prove he was the man who had recorded a handful of obscure sides for Okeh Records in 1928. The clue that led him there was hidden in a song title: Avalon Blues. This episode reconstructs the life of Mississippi John Hurt,...

Lucky Peterson was born Judge Kenneth Peterson in Buffalo, New York in December 1964, the son of bluesman James Peterson, whose nightclub, the Governor's Inn, was a regular stop for the greatest touring blues musicians of the era. When Willie Dixon came through and saw the five-year-old perform, he took him under his wing and in 1971 released his first single, 1-2-3-4, a cover of James Brown's Ple...

Derek Trucks bought his first acoustic guitar for five dollars at a garage sale in Jacksonville, Florida at age nine, played his first paid gig at 11 and by 13 was touring with a band called Thunderhawk and trading riffs on stage with Buddy Guy. This episode explains why he became a slide player in the first place: his hands were too small to fret an adult guitar, so a glass slide let him bypass t...

Riley B. King was born in 1925 on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. After his mother left when he was four, he was raised largely by his grandmother, worked a cotton gin in Indianola, and learned his first three chords from a Pentecostal minister who played a Sears Roebuck Silvertone in church. His first guitar cost $15, paid off when his employer docked hi...

Christone "Kingfish" Ingram was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on January 19, 1999, into a family where music was a serious pursuit: his mother, Princess Pride, was a first cousin of country pioneer Charley Pride. He grew up participating in church music, and at about five his father showed him a PBS documentary on Muddy Waters and promised a trip to the local Delta Blues Museum. There, in the m...

Walter Brown "Brownie" McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915 and raised in Kingsport, where a bout of polio at around age four left him unable to walk. His brother Granville earned the nickname "Stick" by pushing him along the dirt roads in a cart, and later wrote the rhythm and blues hit "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee." Their father George, a factory worker, sang and played guitar around...

Fred McDowell was born on January 12, 1904, in Rossville, Tennessee, orphaned in his youth, and playing guitar for tips at local dances by age 14. He moved to Memphis in 1926 to work at the Buckeye Feed Mill, drifted back to Mississippi to pick cotton in 1928, and settled in Como around 1940, where he farmed full time for decades and played only on weekends for picnics and juke joint dances. In th...

Charlie Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, and moved to Memphis at age three, coming of age in the 1950s as rockabilly, country, and rhythm and blues collided into early rock and roll. While Sun Studio packaged that sound for a mass teenage audience, Charlie was running moonshine in a 1950 Lincoln, digging ditches, pouring concrete, and seeking out unamplified street-level bluesmen li...

Katie Webster, born Kathryn Jewel Thorne in Houston, Texas, on January 11, 1936, forged her musical identity in Louisiana as a session pianist and percussionist for independent labels like Excello and Goldband, backing swamp blues artists such as Lightnin' Slim and Lonesome Sundown. Those studios were factory floors for regional jukebox hits, and her job was to sit down, find the groove instantly,...

Susan Tedeschi was born in Boston in November 1970 and raised in Norwell, Massachusetts, the great-granddaughter of the founder of the Tedeschi Food Shops chain. Instead of a retail career, she made her public debut at five as an understudy in a Broadway musical, found her Catholic family's church choirs stifling and sought out African American Baptist churches for a more alive gospel sound, and a...

On May 3, 2001, Austin mayor Kirk Watson declared Gary Clark Jr. Day for a guitar prodigy who had not yet finished high school. Born in Austin on February 15, 1984, Clark got an Ibanez RX-20 for Christmas at 13 and taught himself from instructional books checked out of the Covington Middle School library, working through Jimmy Reed tabs while soaking up Green Day and Nirvana on the radio. Learning...

Eddie Jones, known to the world as Guitar Slim, was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1926, lost his mother at five, and was raised by his grandmother while working the cotton fields of the Delta. At night he found sanctuary in rural juke joints, not as a guitarist but as a singer and dancer so kinetic that locals nicknamed him "Limber Leg." After military service in World War II he relocated to...

Gus Cannon was born in Red Banks, Mississippi, around 1883, though his tombstone claims 1874, a discrepancy that reflects how little documentation existed for Black Americans born in the rural South after the Civil War. Raised alongside nine brothers who played fiddle, guitar, and banjo, he was sent 100 miles away at age 12 to sharecrop cotton in Clarksdale with his brother Tom. Unable to afford a...

Henry "Mule" Townsend was born in October 1909 in Shelby, Mississippi, to a father who played guitar and accordion. After the family moved near Cairo, Illinois, and the home turned abusive, nine-year-old Henry ran away and hoboed alone to St. Louis, where he took guitar lessons from a local figure named Dudlow Joe and paid his way as an auto mechanic, shoe shiner, hotel manager, and salesman. That...