pplpod

On June 12, 2011, at the Chicago Blues Festival, Cookie Taylor walked on stage carrying her late mother Koko Taylor's crown and placed it on Shemekia Copeland, naming her the new Queen of the Blues. In a genre built on lineage, that title cannot be self-proclaimed; it has to be handed down. This episode traces how the daughter of Texas blues guitarist Johnny Copeland, born in Harlem on April 10, 1...

Imagine being a hit recording artist in your twenties, working with Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Sidney Bechet, then vanishing from the industry for forty years to sing and play organ for a church congregation in Detroit, only to re-emerge in your sixties, tour internationally, and earn a Grammy nomination in your eighties. That is the life of Beulah Belle Thomas, known to record buyers as Si...

In a New York nightclub in the late 1930s, a young Black queer woman stood on stage aggressively shredding an electric guitar, playing a loud, rhythmic music that did not yet have a name. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was building the sonic architecture of rock and roll a decade before the men who usually get the credit. This episode pulls the original blueprints back out, tracing how a child prodigy born...

Drop the needle on a 1929 Sleepy John Estes record and the weathered, sobbing voice sounds like a man at the end of his life. Early-1960s blues historians assumed he had died decades earlier, and Big Bill Broonzy had even written that he was dead. But in 1962 Bob Koester and Samuel Charters followed the geographic clues in his lyrics to Brownsville, Tennessee, and found him alive, completely blind...

The driving rhythms behind Elvis Presley's One Night and a scene in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman trace back to a New Orleans singer who, at the end of his career, was riding the city bus to open for performers whose careers he had made possible. Overton Amos Lemons, known as Smiley Lewis, was the first to record Blue Monday and I Hear You Knocking, only to watch Fats Domino and pop singer Gale S...

Imagine a concert where the band has no idea what the frontman will play next. No set list, no planned encore, just requests shouted from the crowd and pulled from a mental library of more than 2,500 songs spanning blues, jazz, rock and roll, country, and Latin music, all played flawlessly on the spot. That was a typical night for Fird Eaglin Jr., the New Orleans guitarist known as Snooks Eaglin a...

On a military base in the early 1940s, a soldier cupped a small harmonica against the microphone of a parade-ground public address system and blew a bugle call. The loud, raw, distorted sound that blasted out was a technological epiphany that helped birth the electric, overdriven sound of Chicago blues harmonica. That soldier was James Edward Pryor, known as Snooky Pryor. This episode traces his j...

On a hot Southern farm field in the early 20th century, a young boy pulled a harmonica from his pocket and played with such driving rhythm that the plow horses synced up and pulled harder. That boy was Saunders Terrell, born October 24, 1911, known to the world as Sonny Terry. By sixteen, two separate eye injuries had left him completely blind, erasing agricultural work as an option and turning a...

Walter E. Lewis swept the streets of Memphis for 44 years, up before dawn, largely invisible to the city around him. Then, in his seventies and eighties, he opened for the Rolling Stones, sat on the couch with Johnny Carson, acted in a Burt Reynolds movie, and was profiled in Playboy. Known as Furry Lewis, he was a foundational country blues guitarist whose life bridged the 19th-century origins of...

Picture being born on a quiet, isolated tenant farm in Mississippi in the early 1900s, where the soundtrack is wind, hand tools, and an acoustic guitar on a porch, and then standing decades later in a packed South Side Chicago club shaking with amplified guitars and booming vocals. Albert Luandrew, known as Sunnyland Slim, was the engine of that transformation. This episode explores how one life s...

Aaron Thibeaux "T-Bone" Walker is the musician B.B. King called his sole inspiration for picking up an electric guitar, the player Chuck Berry named as a foundational influence, and the showman whose behind-the-head and teeth-playing stage tricks Jimi Hendrix copied decades later. In this deep dive we trace Walker's evolution from a multi-instrumental childhood in Dallas, where his stepfather Marc...

James Lewis Carter Ford, known to the blues world as T-Model Ford, did not start playing guitar until his fifth wife handed him one as a parting gift on her way out the door. He was in his 70s, illiterate, and carrying the scars of a life that included a severely abusive father, childhood labor in the fields and a sawmill, years as a lumber company foreman and truck driver, and a murder conviction...

Tab Benoit plays a stock 1972 Fender Telecaster Thinline, and the gritty, breathing tone of that semi-hollow guitar is the sound of the Louisiana swamps he has spent decades fighting to save. Born in 1967 in Houma, Louisiana, Benoit learned swamp blues not from sheet music but on stage at Tabby Thomas's Blues Box in Baton Rouge, playing alongside living legends like Tabby Thomas, Raful Neal and He...

Nehemiah "Skip" James was twice presumed murdered by the people of his Mississippi hometown, disappeared from music for 33 years, and was found alive in a Tunica hospital bed in 1964 by young fans who refused to believe the rumors. In this deep dive we trace one of the core architects of the Delta blues from his 1902 birth near Bentonia, Mississippi, where his mother Phyllis, a plantation cook, bo...

Leslie Johnson, better known as Lazy Lester, took over Buddy Guy's spot in a Louisiana band in 1957 without owning a guitar, then made music history on a bus ride. Tagging along with Lightnin' Slim to an Excello Records session for producer Jay Miller, Lester watched the hired harmonica player fail to show, spent the afternoon searching for him, and finally volunteered to play the parts himself. T...

Otis Verries Hicks, known as Lightnin' Slim, built the sound of swamp blues, lost everything to a rigged industry, and was working in a Michigan metal foundry when a fan knocked on his door and resurrected his career. In this deep dive we begin with the historical erasure of his early life: for decades his biography placed his birth on a farm near St. Louis, until researchers Bob Eagle, Eric LeBla...

Clara Smith recorded 122 tracks for Columbia Records, sang alongside Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, was second only to Bessie Smith in blues record sales during the 1920s, and gave a 13-year-old Josephine Baker her first job in show business. Yet history has largely reduced her to a footnote, in part because she shared a last name with Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, to whom she was entirel...

Rufus Thomas cut his first record at 33 and it sold five copies, four of which he bought himself. Decades later he became the only father in music history to follow his own teenage daughter into the Billboard Top 10. In this deep dive we trace the ultimate late bloomer from a Mississippi sharecropping family that moved to Memphis around 1920, through a stage debut at age six playing a frog, tap da...

William Thomas Dupree fought 107 bouts, won the Golden Gloves, survived two years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and still sat down at the piano to pound out some of the wittiest, most joyful boogie-woogie ever recorded. In this deep dive into the life of Champion Jack Dupree, we start with a birth in New Orleans that historians date anywhere from 1908 to 1910, the loss of both parents by age...

William Samuel McTier, known to history as Blind Willie McTell, read and wrote musical arrangements in Braille, played a booming 12-string guitar to cut through the noise of Atlanta's streets, and recorded under a rotating cast of aliases to outsmart the labels that exploited him. In this deep dive we trace his life from the Happy Valley community outside Thomson, Georgia, where he was born in 189...

In 1951 Ike Turner organized the band, booked the session with Sam Phillips and shaped the distorted guitar sound on "Rocket 88," a record many historians call a contender for the first true rock and roll single. The label credited it to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, Brenston sold the rights for more than $900, and Turner and the Kings of Rhythm were paid $20 each. In this deep dive we exami...

Syd Barrett named Pink Floyd by mashing together two first names he spotted in the liner notes of a 1962 blues album: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The man whose record those notes were printed on was Fulton Allen, better known as Blind Boy Fuller, and his 36 years were a raw, unfiltered lesson in what it took to survive as a disabled, underprivileged Black man in the early 20th-century South....

In the summer of 1999, the jam band Phish invited exactly one outside artist to play their massive Camp Oswego festival in upstate New York: a battle-tested Chicago bluesman named Frank "Son" Seals. To reach that stage he had survived losing 13 of his 14 siblings, a point-blank gunshot to the jaw, the amputation of part of his leg, and the loss of his home to fire. In this deep dive we trace how a...

On a freezing Chicago morning in the late 1960s, a man in a transit uniform climbed into the driver's seat of a city bus while, thousands of miles away, a young David Bowie was recording one of his songs. William "Billy Boy" Arnold wrote "I Wish You Would" and "I Ain't Got You," played the driving harmonica on Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man," and helped lay the sonic blueprint of electric blues and rock...

When Eddie "The Chief" Clearwater stepped onto a Chicago blues stage, he wore a full Native American headdress and held his guitar upside down, playing strictly left-handed. Neither was a gimmick. In this deep dive we trace how Edward Harrington, born January 10, 1935 in Macon, Mississippi and raised by a grandmother of part Cherokee descent, taught himself guitar at 13 with the strings inverted,...