pplpod

In 1959 producer John Hammond took out a missing persons ad in Variety to find one of the architects of 1920s American music. Ida Cox, billed as the Uncrowned Queen of the Blues, was living quietly in Knoxville, Tennessee, 14 years after a stroke ended her career mid-performance. This episode traces her from the shadow of Georgia's Riverside plantation, where she was born Ida Prather, through runn...

A bluesman in a head-to-toe zebra print tuxedo, singing in a piercing high voice, looks like a novelty act. Then you hear the lyrics. This episode explores how J.B. Lenoir, born March 5, 1929 in Monticello, Mississippi with a given name that was literally just the letters J.B., used visual spectacle as a Trojan horse for razor-sharp social and political commentary. We follow his early years absorb...

For years James Cotton told interviewers that Sonny Boy Williamson II took him in as a nine-year-old orphan and raised him like a son. Late in life he admitted he made that part up, and the real story is better. Born in 1935 in Tunica, Mississippi to sharecroppers Hattie and Moses, both dead by the time he was nine, Cotton heard Williamson on the radio and convinced his uncle to move to West Helen...

The story of how Charlie Parker got the nickname Bird involves a dead chicken, a freezing Nebraska road and a car full of jazz musicians. The man driving that car was Jay McShann, and this episode is about him. Born James Columbus McShann on January 12, 1916 in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Hootie taught himself piano by secretly watching his sister's lessons and staying up to hear Earl Fatha Hines broadcas...

In 1986 a sold-out Paris blues club watched a solo artist generate a hypnotic wall of rhythm with the authority of a lifelong touring star. A few years earlier she had been playing the same music at family picnics in Mississippi. This episode tells the story of Jessie Mae Hemphill, born in 1923 near Como and Senatobia in the north Mississippi hill country, where the music grew out of African-roote...

In 1969, a teenage guitarist from a Fort Worth band called the Chessmen lent his Vox wah-wah pedal to Jimi Hendrix, who destroyed it on stage and handed back his own road-tested pedal as an apology. That teenager was Jimmie Vaughan. This episode traces the foundational architect of Texas blues rock from his birth in March 1951 in the gritty Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, his first gig at L.V. S...

Jimmy Dawkins spent 14 years hauling cardboard in a Chicago box factory by day and playing electric guitar in blues clubs by night before he ever made a record of his own. This episode traces James Henry Dawkins from his 1936 birth in Tchula, Mississippi, through his 1955 move north in the Great Migration, and his long apprenticeship as a session musician during the real-time invention of Chicago'...

Jimmy McCracklin spent more than a decade selling records to one regional community through tiny West Coast labels before a single television appearance turned him into a national pop star overnight. This episode traces the 70-year career of James David Walker Jr., born in 1921 in either Elaine, Arkansas or St. Louis, Missouri depending on the source, who joined the Navy in 1938 and settled in Ric...

In a late-1950s recording studio, the man architecting one of the most influential sounds in rock and roll could not remember his own lyrics, so his wife pulled her chair into the shadows and whispered each line into his ear a split second before he sang it. This episode explores the life of Mathis James Reed, born in 1925 in Dunleith, Mississippi, who moved to Chicago in 1943, served in the Navy...

Imagine helping to invent a musical genre, then a few years later driving a taxi and running a clothing store because the industry has moved on without you. That was the reality for Jimmy Rogers, the guitarist who anchored Muddy Waters' first Chicago band. Born James A. Lane on June 3, 1924 near Ruleville, Mississippi, Rogers grew up moving through Atlanta and Memphis, started on harmonica alongsi...

Most blues origin stories start in a Chicago club or at a Mississippi crossroads. Jimmy Witherspoon first grabbed the public's attention singing in Calcutta, India in the middle of World War II. Born August 8, 1920 in Gurdon, Arkansas to a railroad worker who sang in local choirs and a mother who played piano, Witherspoon joined the Merchant Marines, landed in Calcutta and sang with expatriate jaz...

Joe Bonamassa holds the record for the most number one albums in blues history, around 30 by 2026, and he opened for B.B. King at age 12. Yet he built that empire while aggressively shunning mainstream trends, never chasing a radio hit and operating outside the conventional label system. This episode traces his path from a 1977 birth in New Hartford, New York and a childhood in Utica surrounded by...

John Lee Hooker was celebrated with a year-long 100th birthday party in 2017, but census records from 1920 and 1930 suggest the guest of honor was actually born in 1912 and turning 105. That mystery is a fitting opening for a bluesman who recorded under a dozen names and played by his own internal clock. This episode traces his path from a strict Mississippi sharecropping household, where only rel...

John Mayall, the godfather of British blues, died in July 2024 at 90, leaving behind a legacy that reads like the family tree of rock and roll. This episode looks at how a self-taught graphic designer from Northern England, who did not commit to music full time until he was 30, built the band that launched the most acclaimed eras of Cream, Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones. We start with his fa...

On Christmas Day 1954 in Houston, Texas, Johnny Ace bought a gleaming new 1955 Oldsmobile and, barely an hour later, accidentally shot himself backstage at his own concert. The fatal gunshot made him the first artist in history to cross over onto the Billboard pop charts posthumously. This episode traces the brief, meteoric life of the early rhythm and blues pioneer born John Marshall Alexander Jr...

Johnny Copeland spent two decades grinding through Houston clubs and juke joints, building a reputation as a master of Texas electric blues, only to watch disco and the turntable wipe out the live band economy that fed him. Instead of quitting, he made a counterintuitive move to New York City in 1976, the very birthplace of the music that displaced him, and walked into a market vacuum that led to...

A full decade before Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Guitar Watson was doing handstands with an electric guitar, roaming out the club door and down the street on a 150-foot cable with his amp cranked to its limits. Decades later he told an interviewer he had not merely anticipated rap but invented it. This episode charts the shape-shifting life of John Watson Jr., born in Houston in 1935 to a pianist father...

In 1966, a 51-year-old construction worker stood in the shadows of a Chicago blues club, quietly photographing the musicians on stage. Years earlier he had sold every guitar and amplifier he owned after the recording industry broke his heart. A Vanguard Records scout in the crowd recognized him, and one of the most stunning second acts in American music began. This episode traces the life of Johnn...

Josh White was the first African-American male to become a national sex symbol, the first in his genre to sell a million records, the first to tour segregated venues with a white female co-star, and the first to give a command performance at the White House. Yet for many today he is a ghost in the pop culture machine, his fame nearly erased by Cold War politics. This episode follows his life from...

The driving guitar riff and the original Mystery Train that helped define Elvis Presley's rockabilly era were both photocopied from the same artist, a velvet-voiced blues innovator who has been almost entirely erased from the headline of that era. This episode traces Herman Junior Parker from a muddy origin on the Eastover plantation near Bobo, Mississippi, through a teenage apprenticeship on harm...

In a 1940s juvenile courtroom, a young boy charged with stealing a harmonica from a pawn shop answered the judge by picking it up and playing. The performance was so moving that the judge reached into his own pocket, paid the 50 cents the boy had been short, and dismissed the case. That boy was Amos Wells Blakemore Jr., the future Junior Wells. This episode follows him from Memphis and West Memphi...

Imagine a childhood where Buddy Guy and Slim Harpo were just hanging around your living room, playing in the corner and swapping road stories. For Kenny Neal, born in New Orleans in 1957 to influential harmonica player Raful Neal, that was reality, and it became a master class in Louisiana swamp blues. This episode explores how Neal treated that inherited tradition not as a museum piece but as a t...

Kenny Wayne Shepherd went from tearing through cheap plastic toy guitars bought with his grandmother's grocery reward stamps to playing the white Stratocaster Jimi Hendrix used at Woodstock on national television. This episode traces the unorthodox musical education of the blues rock guitarist born Kenneth Wayne Brobst in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1977, the son of radio personality and concert prom...

A harmonica that fits in a shirt pocket somehow sounds like an entire brass section, and the man playing it did not come from Chicago or the Delta but from the sunny suburb of Goleta, California, where he was once known as Goleta Slim. This episode traces how Kim Wilson, born in Detroit in 1951, placed himself in the room with the architects of electric blues by the late 1960s, absorbing direct me...

In 1962, at the height of the folk and blues revival, researchers finally tracked down a missing legend of the 1930s blues scene working a quiet factory job in Chicago. They offered him adoring young audiences and a lucrative return to the stage. He shrugged, said he had no interest, and went back to his shift. That man was James Kokomo Arnold, a reluctant pioneer whose slide guitar and lyrics bec...