pplpod

David "Honeyboy" Edwards was born in Shaw, Mississippi, in 1915 and learned music from a father who played guitar and violin. At 14 he left home to travel with bluesman Big Joe Williams, a dangerous choice in a Jim Crow South where vagrancy laws targeted young Black men traveling without proof of employment. He hitchhiked on trucks, hopped freight trains, and followed the money to remote levee cam...

Theodore Roosevelt "Hound Dog" Taylor was born in Natchez, Mississippi, sometime between 1915 and 1917 with polydactyly, a rudimentary sixth finger on each hand, and one night, drunk at his kitchen table, he cut the extra digit off his right hand with a straight razor. That raw, do-it-yourself approach defined everything that followed. He played piano first and did not touch a guitar until he was...

Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., the New Orleans musician who became Dr. John and the real-life inspiration for the Muppets' Dr. Teeth, was born in 1941, though he listed 1940 for decades to sneak into nightclubs as a teenager. His education began in his father's East End appliance shop, a distribution hub for records by King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, and in local studios where he watched Little Rich...

Edward L. Vinson Jr. was born in Houston, Texas, on December 18, 1917, and earned his lifelong nickname when a lye-heavy hair-straightening product burned off his hair in patches; rather than hide, he shaved the rest and became Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. He came up in the loud, collaborative Texas scene of the 1930s, touring with the Milton Larkin Orchestra alongside peers like Cedric Haywood and W...

In the autumn of 1967, someone spray-painted "Clapton is God" on a wall at London's Islington Underground station, elevating a guitarist in his early twenties to deity status. The man behind the myth was fractured: born in Surrey in 1945 and raised by grandparents he believed were his parents, Eric Clapton learned that the woman he thought was his older sister was his teenage mother and that his f...

From a six-year-old in Surrey gluing cigar boxes to a fence post after hearing Les Paul on the radio, to the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group and a fearless run of instrumental jazz-rock fusion, this episode traces how Jeff Beck spent a lifetime trying to solve one impossible problem: making a Fender Stratocaster sound like a human voice. We follow the working-class tinkerer who painted cars and wor...

Kevin Roosevelt Moore was born in South Los Angeles in October 1951 to parents from Louisiana and Texas, grew up steeped in blues and gospel, and spent two decades as a respected but largely invisible working musician: a steel drummer in a calypso band, a sideman for Papa John Creach, a co-writer of Git Fiddler on Jefferson Starship's number one album Red Octopus, a staff writer at A&M Records...

Born Cora Ann Walton on September 28, 1928, in Shelby County, Tennessee, the daughter of a sharecropper, Koko Taylor left the segregated rural South in 1952 with her truck-driving husband Robert Taylor, known as Pops, and headed for Chicago. In the packed, smoke-filled South Side clubs where electric guitars competed with the roar of the city, her rough, powerful voice became a survival tool. This...

Music historians consider Leroy Carr perhaps the most influential male blues artist of the early 20th century, yet his recording career lasted only seven years and he was dead at 30. Born in Nashville around 1904 or 1905 to a Vanderbilt laborer and a domestic worker, Carr moved to Indianapolis during the Great Migration, taught himself piano, dropped out of high school, traveled with a circus, ser...

Marion Walter Jacobs was born in Marksville, Louisiana, without a birth certificate, quit school and left home by age 12, and survived by busking on the streets of New Orleans, Memphis, Helena and St. Louis alongside veterans like Sonny Boy Williamson II, Sunnyland Slim and Honeyboy Edwards. When he arrived in Chicago in 1946, electric guitars were drowning out the acoustic harmonica. This episode...

In 1920, vaudeville performer Mamie Smith became the first African American artist to make vocal blues recordings, and her Crazy Blues sold a million copies in less than a year. This episode draws on John Jeremiah Sullivan's archival research, which located her real birth certificate in 2018 and moved her birth from 1883 to May 26, 1891, in Cincinnati, along with OKeh Records studio logs and vaude...

In the Pottersville sequence of It's a Wonderful Life, an uncredited extra hammers away at a piano in the background of Nick's Bar. That extra was Anderson Meade Lewis, known as Meade Lux Lewis, one of the primary architects of the boogie-woogie craze and a foundational figure in the rhythm of early rock and roll. This episode traces his disputed 1905 birth in Chicago or Louisville, the violin les...

He was born John Len Chapman in Memphis in 1915, signed his contracts as Peter Chapman, and stepped onto stages from Chicago to Paris as Memphis Slim. This episode explores how one pianist used a maze of legal and stage identities to survive the most exploitative eras of the music business, from the loud, unamplified honky-tonks and gambling joints of West Memphis and the Missouri bootheel in the...

Paul Butterfield grew up in Chicago's academic Hyde Park neighborhood in the 1950s, the son of a lawyer and a painter, studying flute with a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and holding an Ivy League track scholarship offer from Brown University. Then a severe knee injury ended his athletic career, and he and friend Nick Gravenites began crossing the color lines of a deeply segregated city...

R.L. Burnside was born in 1926 in Lafayette County, Mississippi, on ground now submerged beneath Sardis Lake, and grew up absorbing church singing, fife and drum picnics and the playing of his neighbor Mississippi Fred McDowell. This episode traces a life of staggering loss and survival: the Chicago year in which his father, two brothers and two uncles were all murdered, the murder conviction that...

Roosevelt Sykes was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1999, yet his grave in New Orleans went unmarked for 32 years. This episode follows the pianist known as the Honeydripper from his 1906 birth in the sawmill town of Elmar, Arkansas, through summers at his preacher grandfather's farm near West Helena, where a 10-year-old with no training taught himself to make a church organ mimic his own...

In the summer of 2013, a skeptical Buddy Guy called a 24-year-old guitarist from Missouri onto his stage, watched her tear into the strings, and told the crowd that talent like that made him want to play all night. This episode traces how Samantha Fish, born in January 1989 in Kansas City to a church choir director and a guitar-playing father, started out as a drummer, switched to guitar at 15, ab...

No one knows exactly when or where Sonny Boy Williamson II was born, and the name etched into the history books was taken from a rival Chicago star who was still alive at the time. This episode digs into census data, historical records and musical archives to untangle the life of Alex Miller, nicknamed Rice Miller, a sharecropper's son from Mississippi who claimed five different birth years, aged...

William Christopher Handy grew up in Florence, Alabama, in a log cabin built by his grandfather, the son of a pastor who believed a guitar was a tool of the devil. When young Handy saved his pennies from picking berries and making lye soap to buy one, his father made him exchange it for a dictionary. This episode explains how that suppression turned him into an elite listener who heard music in wh...

Walter Trout spent decades becoming one of the best blues rock guitarists in the world, then, in his 60s, lost the ability to walk, speak, recognize his family or play a single chord. This episode draws on biographies, medical journals and retrospective interviews to follow the Ocean City, New Jersey native from the coastal music scene to Los Angeles, where he served as a sideman for John Lee Hook...

Fenton Robinson wrote and played the hidden DNA of the blues, then watched fate and the industry take the credit. Born in 1935 on a farm near Greenwood, Mississippi, he moved to Memphis in 1953, cut his first single Tennessee Woman in 1957, recorded the future standard As the Years Go Passing By in 1959, and played the defining guitar parts on Larry Davis's original 1958 recording of Texas Flood a...

In 1963 a single postcard addressed only to Bukka White, Old Blues Singer, care of General Delivery, Aberdeen, Mississippi, found its way to a Memphis factory worker and relaunched one of the most important careers in Delta blues. This episode traces the life of Booker T. Washington White, from a farm south of Houston, Mississippi, through his 1930 discovery by talent scout Ralph Lembo, his Victor...

Morris Holt dreamed of playing piano until a cotton gin accident took his pinky finger. That loss forced him onto stringed instruments and, as this episode explains, mechanically shaped the slurring, sliding guitar style the world came to know as Magic Slim. Born August 7, 1937 in Torrance, Mississippi to sharecroppers, Holt moved to Chicago in 1955 alongside his friend and mentor Magic Sam, who p...

On stage he was a 275-pound, six-foot-three force of nature who crawled across the boards and had to be revived by paramedics after his final show. Off stage he sat in a Pontiac station wagon balancing a ledger so his band members had health insurance and Social Security contributions. This episode traces how Chester Arthur Burnett, born in Mississippi in 1910, survived being thrown out into the w...

When Hubert Sumlin died in December 2011, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards quietly covered his funeral expenses. This episode explains why. Born in 1931 in Greenwood, Mississippi and raised in Hughes, Arkansas, Sumlin picked up the guitar at eight and as a boy sneaked into a juke joint to watch Howlin' Wolf perform. In 1954, a year after Wolf relocated to Chicago and lost longtime guitarist Willie J...