pplpod

In the summer of 2013, a call came in on behalf of Bob Dylan asking Duke Robillard to become his lead guitarist. To follow a songwriter whose catalog spans folk, country, early rock and roll, Delta blues, and swing, you need an encyclopedic command of American music, and Robillard had spent nearly six decades building exactly that. Born Michael John Robillard in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1948,...

Ishmon Bracey recorded just sixteen songs, yet collectors treat his original 78s as holy grails of Mississippi Delta blues. Born in Byram, Mississippi, around 1899 or 1901, he learned bottleneck slide guitar directly from local players Rubin Lacy and Louis Cooper and cut his teeth at rural fish fries, dances, and juke joints where there was no amplification and the music had to physically cut thro...

In 1963, field researchers George Mitchell and Roger Brown asked around Shorter's Barbershop on Atlanta's Decatur Street for a blues pioneer who had vanished decades earlier. Ten men volunteered to lead the way to a weathered house where they found a 75-year-old double amputee in a wheelchair who had not recorded in 34 years. The moment he was handed a guitar, the decades evaporated. That man was...

The godfather of shock rock, the man who burst out of a coffin in a leopard-skin suit clutching a smoking skull named Henry, spent his childhood obsessively studying Chopin and dreaming of becoming an opera singer like Paul Robeson. Born Jalacy Hawkins in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 and raised in a boarding house in the foster care system, he told his music tutor he was only learning the rules so he...

In 1964, three young blues researchers knocked on the door of a retired railroad porter in Rochester, New York, and had to inform him that he was famous. Edward James House Jr., known as Son House, had walked away from music in 1943 and had no idea that a new generation regarded his 1930 Paramount recordings as sacred texts of Delta blues. Born in 1902 near Lyon, Mississippi, House grew up watchin...

Millions of people have chanted his first name in arenas and worn it on t-shirts for decades, yet almost nobody knows who Floyd Council was. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on September 2, 1911, to Harry and Lizzie Council, he grew up in the Piedmont region, a crossroads of tobacco farms, textile mills, and railroads where church hymns, minstrel shows, string bands, and ragtime piano collided...

In a Minneapolis dive bar in the mid-1990s, a 14-year-old who looked like a high school freshman stepped on stage and sang with the gritty, weathered voice of a 50-year-old blues veteran. Record executives who had flown across the country to see him signed him on the spot. Jonny Lang, born John Gordon Langseth Jr. in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1981, picked up the guitar at 12, took lessons from Ted L...

A decade after his peak, the man who helped invent rock and roll was knocking on suburban doors selling encyclopedias to survive. Wynonie Harris was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 24, 1915, to a 15-year-old unmarried mother, dropped out of high school in 1931, and hustled through the Great Depression as a dancer with partner Velda Shannon before singing the blues at Jim Bell's Club Harlem. He...

Hit the Road Jack is one of the most recognizable upbeat anthems in American music, but the man who wrote it never sang from a place of swagger. This episode traces the life of Percy Mayfield, the songwriter his peers called the poet laureate of the blues. Born in Louisiana in 1920 with an early gift for poetry, Mayfield moved to Los Angeles in 1942, recorded Two Years of Torture for Swingtime Rec...

In the early 1950s, dropping a coin in a jukebox often meant hearing Amos Milburn, the rhythm and blues pioneer whose rowdy anthems about whiskey, vodka and partying until dawn made him the ultimate avatar of a good time. Yet the man behind Bad Bad Whiskey and One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer did not struggle with alcohol at all. This episode unpacks that contradiction and what it reveals about h...

In a deafening 1950s Chicago blues club, a guitarist was unknowingly writing the blueprint for California surf rock, the phrasing of the Grateful Dead and the sound that would terrify a young Eric Clapton. This episode explores the life and legacy of Freddie King, one of the three kings of the blues guitar alongside Albert King and B.B. King, none of them related. Born in Texas in 1934 and taught...

A 10-year-old boy stands over a mechanical player piano in a Chicago living room, pencil in hand, marking each key as it dips so he can teach himself the song. That boy was Albert Ammons, who grew up to become one of the defining figures of boogie-woogie piano. Born March 1, 1907 to two pianist parents, Ammons played percussion in a drum and bugle corps as a teenager, learned the blues from Chicag...

In the segregated Texas blues clubs of the 1950s and 60s, a lanky teenager with white hair and pale skin stepped up to the microphone and stopped the room cold. Johnny Winter, born in Beaumont, Texas in 1944 with albinism, grew up in a musical household, played ukulele on a children's television program at age 10, released his first record, School Day Blues, at 15 with Johnny and the Jammers, and...

Half a million people at Woodstock in 1969 swayed to Canned Heat's Going Up the Country without knowing its bouncing melody and distinctive solo came from a man born to freed slaves in Texas nearly a century earlier. This episode pieces together the fragmented life of Henry Thomas, billed in his day as Ragtime Texas. Born in 1874 in Big Sandy, Texas, Thomas rejected sharecropping as a teenager, ho...

When the source material for this episode turned out to be a sprawling Wikipedia disambiguation page rather than a single biography, the first question became: which Thomas Johnson? The American Founding Father who governed Maryland and sat on the Supreme Court? The 1750s bare-knuckle boxer? The engineer who founded Celestron telescopes? Instead of tracing one life, this deep dive uses one of the...

The mythology of 1960s blues rock says authenticity requires a dusty road and empty pockets. Mike Bloomfield shattered that assumption. Born Michael Bernard Bloomfield in Chicago in 1943, heir to a catering equipment fortune with a 50,000-dollar-a-year trust fund, he was expelled from the prestigious New Trier High School in 1959 for performing a raucous rock and roll song at a school gathering. A...

A desolate Mississippi crossroads at midnight, a shadowy figure who tunes a young man's guitar, and a soul traded for otherworldly mastery: it is the most famous myth in modern music, and it has overshadowed the actual human being at its center. This episode separates Robert Johnson from the legend. Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi around 1911, Johnson spent nearly a decade growing up in Memphis, a...

On New Year's Eve 2006, viewers of Jools Holland's Hootenanny watched a heavily bearded man in a John Deere cap stomp a carpeted wooden box and tear into a distorted blues on a battered three-string guitar. The press hailed him as an authentic train-hopping hobo from the American South. A decade later, Matthew Wright's unauthorized 2016 biography Seasick Steve: Ramblin' Man revealed a very differe...

In 1927, a Columbia Records promotional photo showed a man in a stark white chef's hat and floor-length apron holding a massive 12-string guitar. He looked like a novelty act. He was Robert Hicks, better known as Barbecue Bob, and beneath the manufactured gimmick was one of the best-selling recording artists of the 1920s Piedmont blues scene. Born in 1902 in Walnut Grove, Georgia to sharecroppers...

Imagine laying down a track whose central theme would be adapted by Muddy Waters and inspire the name of the Rolling Stones, then leaving behind exactly 16 recorded songs, a single photograph and no trace of where you went. This episode tracks Robert Petway, a phantom of the Mississippi Delta blues. Researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc place his birth around 1902 or 1903 in Itta Bena, Leflore Co...

Picture the smoothest blues pianist in a dimly lit Los Angeles nightclub, the artist who influenced Ray Charles and defined the sophisticated sound of Central Avenue. Now picture the same man a few years earlier teaching high school chemistry and handling mustard gas at a military arsenal. This episode follows Charles Brown, born Tony Russell Brown in Texas City, Texas in 1922, who lost his mother...

Critics compared his phrasing to Frank Sinatra and called him one of the greatest storytellers in American music, yet Bobby Blue Bland could not read or write a single lyric sheet or contract. This episode traces Robert Calvin Brooks, born in 1930 in rural Barretville, Tennessee, abandoned by his father, who left school in the third grade to work the cotton fields and moved with his mother to Memp...

An artist vanishes in the mid-1940s and resurfaces years later with a new name, an electrified guitar and a heavy sound to rival the greatest legends of Chicago blues. This episode reconstructs the life of Robert Nighthawk, born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas on November 30, 1909, and father of bluesman Sam Carr. He left home young to busk through southern Mississippi, played with the Mem...

Pink Floyd's 1973 album stayed on the Billboard charts for 14 years, but the man behind half of the band's name spent much of his life playing acoustic guitar for loose change in the dirt lots of South Carolina. This episode reconstructs the life of Pinkney Anderson, known as Pink, born February 12, 1900 and raised around Greenville and Spartanburg. At 14 he joined Dr. William R. Kerr's Indian Rem...

Texas Alexander built one of the most influential careers in early recorded blues without ever playing an instrument, and without ever keeping a standard beat. Born Alger Alexander in Jewett, Texas in 1900, he was a short, unassuming man with a massive, resonant voice who came up singing on the streets, at picnics and at country parties in the Brazos River cotton bottomlands. Because he never had...