pplpod

Nirvana's haunting MTV Unplugged closer Where Did You Sleep Last Night and the phrase stay woke both feel like products of the modern era, yet both trace back to a single man born on a Louisiana plantation in the late 1880s. This episode digs into census data, prison records, biographies and discographies to follow Huddie Ledbetter, known to the world as Lead Belly, from farm labor and a first ins...

Lightnin' Hopkins recorded more albums than almost anyone in his genre, played Carnegie Hall, toured Japan and backed a psychedelic rock band, yet for the first half of his career he stubbornly refused to leave one street in Houston. This episode traces Samuel John Hopkins from his 1912 birth in Centerville, Texas, and a 1920 church picnic in Buffalo, Texas where the fiercely protective Blind Lemo...

Little Milton was handed the golden ticket as a teenager, a recording contract with Sun Records, and his singles completely bombed. Instead of fading away, he turned that failure into a blueprint for outliving nearly every label and executive that ever rejected him. This episode follows James Milton Campbell Jr. from his 1934 birth in Inverness, Mississippi, and a Greenville childhood with a fathe...

Cornelius Green III was born in 1928 on the Dugas plantation near Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and spent his early adult years in punishing manual labor: a casino porter in Jefferson Parish, a rice mill hand, a construction hauler, a truck driver, and finally a shift worker at a Gulf oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. Music was his release valve. After guitar lessons from a cousin and a fixation on...

In 1953, a young Lee Baker Jr. was strumming an acoustic guitar on his front porch in Port Arthur, Texas, when zydeco and blues star Clifton Chenier happened to walk down the street, heard him play, and offered him a job in his touring band on the spot. Born December 18, 1933, in Dubuisson, Louisiana, Baker first absorbed music watching his grandfather play banjo, then discovered the electrified s...

The blistering guitar intro to Johnny B. Goode, Little Richard's high-pitched whoop and pencil-thin mustache, the whole attitude of 1950s rock and roll: much of it traces back to a saxophonist and bandleader who peaked a decade earlier. Louis Jordan was born in 1908 in Brinkley, Arkansas, had a clarinet in his hands by age seven courtesy of his music-teacher father, toured with the Rabbit Foot Min...

A teenage Ray Charles once played piano in his band. He wrote the song that gave B.B. King his first hit. Decades later he co-wrote a track that Otis Redding and Carla Thomas turned into a soul classic, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named one of his standards among the 500 songs that shaped rock and roll. Yet Lowell Fulson remains one of the great blind spots of American music history. Born i...

Critic Ernest Borneman once named a big three of the classic female blues era: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and a third name that almost always draws a blank stare, Lucille Bogan. Born Lucille Anderson in 1897, with records split between Amory, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, she married a railway man, raised a son, navigated a divorce, and remarried, all before recording vaudeville songs for OK...

Picture a performer in ostrich plumes, a satin gown, layers of gold necklaces, a diamond tiara, and a smile that flashes gold teeth. It sounds like a modern pop or hip-hop entrance, but this is the 1920s, and the woman on stage is Gertrude Ma Rainey, the Mother of the Blues. She claimed a birth in Columbus, Georgia, in April 1886, though the 1900 census points to September 1882 in Alabama, an earl...

In the summer of 1969, a 32-year-old guitarist set the Ann Arbor Blues Festival on fire, and international bookings began pouring in. Before the year ended, he was gone. Samuel Gene Maghett, known to the world as Magic Sam, was born on Valentine's Day 1937 in Grenada County, Mississippi, taught himself guitar by reverse-engineering Muddy Waters and Little Walter records, and moved to Chicago in 19...

Imagine working the land from dawn to dusk for more than 50 years, unknown to the wider world, and then, in your mid-60s, standing on a California stage sharing a bill with Bob Dylan. That is the true story of Beau De Glen Lipscomb, born April 9, 1895, near Navasota, Texas, to a father who had been born into slavery in Alabama and a mother of African-American and Native American heritage. As a you...

In 1970, a 21-year-old college student was watching Dub and the Dusters tear through a set in a cramped Austin club when musicians Freddie Fletcher and Bobby Earl Smith spotted her in the crowd and waved her onto the stage. She sat down at the piano and took over the room. That night launched the 50-plus-year career of Marcia Ball, newly inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2026. Born March 20,...

In the early 1930s, a 17-year-old in the Mississippi Delta sold his family's last working horse for $15, gave half to the grandmother who raised him, and spent the remaining $7.50 on a mail-order guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalog. That gamble by McKinley Morganfield, nicknamed Muddy by his grandmother Della Grant for playing in a nearby creek, altered the trajectory of global culture. His cons...

A Mississippi farmer spends his life working the land and throwing backyard barbecues for his neighbors, and somehow the music from those parties ends up in a Martin Scorsese film, on critically acclaimed albums, and in the middle of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Otha Turner was born in 1907 in Canton, Mississippi, and settled as a farmer near Como in Panola County. In 1923, at 16, he taught himsel...

A left-handed musician picks up a standard right-handed electric guitar, flips it upside down without restringing it, and curls his pinky under the heavy low string to anchor his hand. It sounds like a recipe for a cramp, but for Otis Rush it became the foundation of a wildly influential style built on slow, crying, sustained bends. Born in 1934 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to a sharecropping fam...

In 1973, millions of viewers watched Redd Foxx sing and dance to Shake That Thing on Sanford and Son. Almost none of them knew that the man who wrote it, and who essentially invented the solo singer-songwriter format in recorded music, was lying in an unmarked grave in a Chicago cemetery. William Henry Jackson, better known as Papa Charlie Jackson, was born in New Orleans in November 1887, a date...

Drop the needle on the Beatles' Revolution in 1968 and the first thing you hear is a blistering, distorted guitar riff. That phrasing was quoted from Do Unto Others, a 1954 single by a Texas-born bluesman named Connie Curtis Crayton, better known as Pee Wee Crayton. Born in Rockdale, Texas, on December 18, 1914, Crayton migrated to Oakland, California, in 1935 and only began playing guitar serious...

In late November 1941, one of the most popular blues musicians in America walked into a studio and recorded songs about mortality, including Bring Me Flowers While I'm Living. Less than a month later, on his 39th birthday, he died hours after the car he was riding in slammed into a parked freight train a block from his home. William Bunch was born in 1902, most likely in Ripley, Tennessee, though...

Winning a Grammy at 97 broke a record long held by comedian George Burns, but Joe Willie Perkins did it playing some of the most physically demanding music there is. Born in 1913 on a plantation in Belzoni, Mississippi, with only a third-grade education, Pinetop Perkins started out as a guitarist until a 1940s knife fight with a chorus girl in a Helena, Arkansas, cafe severed the tendons in his le...

Clarence 'Pinetop' Smith was just 24 when a stray bullet in a Chicago dance hall ended his life in March 1929, one day before a scheduled follow-up recording session. Yet the single track he cut for Vocalion on December 29, 1928, Pine Top's Boogie Woogie, became the first record to put the phrase boogie woogie in a song title and laid down the eight-to-the-bar rhythmic blueprint that would echo th...

Reverend Gary Davis was a blind street preacher who could nap backstage at a New York club, wake up, walk on stage, and unleash a guitar performance that left audiences stunned before going right back to sleep. Born in 1896 in the Piedmont region of South Carolina, he lost his sight as an infant, lost his father at ten, and spent decades busking for spare change. Yet he became a foundational influ...

In 1978, the uncredited bass player backing Otis Day and the Knights at the toga party in National Lampoon's Animal House was a young, unknown musician named Robert Cray. A few decades later he had five Grammy Awards and one of the most distinctive voices in modern blues guitar. This episode traces how a military kid born at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, and raised in Newport News, Virginia,...

In 1930s Clarksdale, Mississippi, crowds on the Sunflower River bridge reportedly could not tell which guitarist on the opposite banks was Robert Johnson and which was his teenage protege. That protege was Robert Lockwood Jr., born in 1915 in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, whose mother Estella was romantically involved with Johnson for about a decade. This episode traces a seventy-plus-year career that...

At fifteen, while the British Invasion saturated the radio, Rory Block packed a bag and left home to find the aging originators of the Mississippi Delta and Piedmont blues while they were still alive. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1949 and raised in Greenwich Village, she grew up in her father Allan Block's sandal shop, an incubator of the folk revival where Peter Rowan, Maria Muldaur, and Joh...

Roy Brown wrote Good Rockin' Tonight, the song widely credited as the first major hit to use the word rock to describe a musical style rather than a bedroom euphemism. His gospel-rooted melisma became the vocal blueprint for B.B. King, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard, James Brown, and Elvis Presley, and in 1952 he became one of the first artists to sue a major label for unpaid royalties and win. The...