pplpod

In 1947, at Houston's Bronze Peacock nightclub, T-Bone Walker fell violently ill backstage while a restless crowd that had been drinking for hours waited for the king of electric blues guitar. An unknown twenty-something raised in Orange, Texas jumped on stage, picked up Walker's own guitar and improvised a song on the spot that he called Gatemouth Boogie. Club owner Don Robey was watching from th...

Otis Spann laid the piano foundation beneath Muddy Waters, recorded with Eric Clapton, and earned the title of premier post-war Chicago blues pianist. Then he died of liver cancer in 1970 and lay for nearly thirty years in an unmarked grave at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. This episode reconstructs his life from contradictory sources, beginning with a birth that some references place in Ja...

On the back cover of Bob Dylan's 1970 album New Morning, a young Dylan stands beside an older, distinguished Black woman most listeners never identify. She is Victoria Spivey, the Queen of the Blues, and without her a large piece of American roots music might not have survived. Born Victoria Regina Spivey in Houston in 1906 to a musical family, she was playing piano at adult rent parties by age se...

Alvin Lee stepped off the Woodstock stage in 1969 crowned the fastest guitar player alive, and the film of that blistering Ten Years After set turned a gig in a muddy field into a global legend. But the man born Graham Anthony Barnes in Nottingham in 1944 had learned his craft from his parents' American jazz and blues records, and the spectacle left him missing the quiet, intimate connection of th...

At the commercial peak of the late 1980s hard rock boom, Gary Moore sat down, listened to his own gold and platinum heavy metal albums, and was repulsed by what he heard. So he traded the leather for a tailored blue suit and recorded a stripped-down traditional blues album. Still Got the Blues sold more than three million copies and became the biggest success of his life. This episode traces how t...

In July 1982, an unknown guitarist from Texas in a wide-brimmed hat walked onto the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival with his rhythm section Double Trouble and unleashed ear-splitting electric blues on a crowd expecting polite acoustic jazz. They booed him off. What Stevie Ray Vaughan did not know was that David Bowie and Jackson Browne were in the audience, and both were blown away. Bowie recr...

As an eight-year-old in rural Tennessee in the early twentieth century, James A. Rachell was given a pig, a genuine financial asset for a farming family, and traded it away for a mandolin. That impractical swap defined a nearly seventy-year career that ran from the late 1920s to the late 1990s and made Yank Rachell a foundational figure in American country blues and one of the very few recognized...

The German battleship Bismarck was the most heavily armored and advanced warship of its day, yet it was brought down by canvas-covered biplanes and a single jammed piece of steering gear. This episode traces the final 72 hours of the Bismarck, from the sinking of HMS Hood in the Denmark Strait on May 24 to the moment the ship capsized on the morning of May 27. Along the way it examines the psychol...

In a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, the man inside the bulletproof glass booth looked like a bored accountant, not the organizer of the Holocaust. This episode traces the path of Adolf Eichmann from a poor student and failed traveling oil salesman to the chief logistician of genocide. Drawing on trial records and biographical sources, it examines how a directionless man in his late twenties found id...

In March 1945 a Japanese paper balloon bomb drifted across the Pacific, hit a power line in Washington State, and triggered an automatic shutdown of a secret nuclear reactor whose workers did not know what they were building. This episode tells the story of the Hanford Site, a 586-square-mile stretch of desert that went from farmland and ancient indigenous fishing grounds to the birthplace of the...

Imagine reverse engineering a complex machine you have never seen, using only the scrambled text it produces. That is what American cryptanalysts did with the Japanese Type B cipher machine, codenamed Purple, which protected Japan's highest-level diplomatic traffic before and during World War II. This episode traces the origins of Purple back to the humiliation of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty,...

On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had to act surprised when Japanese diplomats delivered a message he had already read in translation. This episode explores the Allied cryptanalysis project known as Magic, from a stolen Japanese naval codebook in 1923 through the Blue system broken in 1932 to the machine cipher the Americans called Purple, which William Friedman...

In July 1945, inside the Cecilienhof palace in a ruined Germany, the leaders of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union met to plan the post-war world. This episode examines the Potsdam Conference of July 17 to August 2, 1945, and argues that while the Big Three drafted agreements and ultimatums, they were really laying the groundwork for the Cold War. It sets the scene with a changed cast...

How does an event with a documented death toll of around 25,000 come to be remembered for decades as killing hundreds of thousands? This episode examines the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945, beginning with the anxious mindset of Allied commanders who feared a prolonged war and a mythical National Redoubt in the Alps. It explains Operation Thunderclap, the strategy of paralyzing eastern...

Erich Hartmann flew over 1,400 combat missions, engaged in aerial combat more than 800 times, and was never shot down by direct enemy fire, yet the closest he came to an early death was being grounded for showing off. This episode looks beyond his credited 352 aerial victories to examine the methods that kept him alive, from the glider training his mother gave him as a boy to the four-step mantra...

On a freezing January morning in 1943, three uniformed men walked onto a porch in Waterloo, Iowa, and told a railroad conductor that they had news about all five of his sons. This episode tells the story of the Sullivan brothers, George, Frank, Joe, Matt and Al, whose refusal to be separated led to one of the most catastrophic single-family losses in American military history. It begins with the f...

In the early hours of February 3, 1943, four Army chaplains stood arm in arm on the slanting deck of the torpedoed SS Dorchester, praying in Latin, Hebrew and English, having just given their life jackets to other soldiers. This episode explores who those men were: George L. Fox, a Methodist minister and decorated World War I medic; Alexander D. Goode, a rabbi with a Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins; Cla...

Children who thought bananas were mythical, newlyweds posing with wedding cakes made of cardboard and plaster, and a biologist eating laboratory rats for meat: this was everyday life under British rationing. This episode explores the meticulous and often bizarre system of rationing in the United Kingdom during and after the World Wars, a regime that lasted 14 years. It begins with the brutal math...

The comical bus that splashes into the river on a family vacation was once a critical piece of World War II military technology. This episode traces the history of the DUKW, known as the Duck, from a logistical problem no landing craft could solve: getting ammunition, food and reinforcements from ships anchored miles offshore directly to the front lines without stopping on a contested beach. It in...

The admiral who led the greatest naval armada in history grew up in landlocked Fredericksburg, Texas, wanted to join the Army, and nearly ended his career by running his first command aground on a mud bank. This episode traces the life of Chester W. Nimitz, from the pragmatic philosophy instilled by his seafaring grandfather to the one spare Naval Academy appointment a local congressman happened t...

On January 1, 1945, Adolf Hitler awarded a decoration created for a single person to a pilot who flew 2,530 missions and claimed 519 tanks destroyed. This episode examines the life of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, from a Lutheran minister's son in Silesia who joined the Hitler Youth in 1933 to the most decorated German airman of the war. It covers his part in the September 1941 attack on the Soviet battleshi...

A ship built to carry 1,465 passengers left port on January 30, 1945, with an estimated 10,582 people aboard, into a Baltic night of 18 degrees below zero. Hours later, more than 9,000 of them were dead. This episode tells the life story of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, a vessel whose timeline mirrors the rise and fall of the Third Reich. It begins with the ship's origins as a 25 million Reichsmark cru...

Imagine a tank so heavy that any typical European bridge would fracture beneath it, so its designers planned for it to crawl across riverbeds underwater, powered by a cable from a second identical tank on shore. This episode examines the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, the heaviest fully enclosed armored fighting vehicle ever built. It begins with Ferdinand Porsche's March 1942 order for a 100-ton tan...

The T-34 rolled off Soviet assembly lines unpainted and straight into the fires of Stalingrad, and more than 80,000 were eventually built. This episode traces the tank from its origins in the border clashes with Japan in Manchuria, where petrol engines and riveted armor turned Soviet tanks into death traps, to engineer Mikhail Koshkin's vision of a universal tank with a V-12 diesel engine, wide tr...

In the middle of World War II, the most advanced radar networks on the planet could be disabled by strips of shiny paper tossed from an airplane. This episode explores the history and physics of chaff, first known by the British code name Window, and how four separate powers, the UK, Germany, the United States, and Japan, independently invented the same countermeasure. We break down why metal stri...