pplpod

Hammie Nixon, born in 1908 in Brownsville, Tennessee, came up in the 1920s jug band scene playing kazoo, guitar and the jug itself, and this episode argues that those years taught him something that changed blues music. Playing jug meant buzzing your lips into a vessel to supply a syncopated bass line and lock the tempo, and Nixon carried that rhythmic thinking to the harmonica. Instead of using t...

In 1956, while charismatic vocalists dominated rock and roll, an instrumental called Honky Tonk sat atop the Billboard R&B chart for more than two months, sold four million copies and peaked at number two on the pop chart. This episode explains how Bill Doggett engineered that hit. Born William Ballard Doggett in Philadelphia in 1916, he spent the 1930s and early 1940s writing arrangements for...

At the closing ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, with roughly three billion people watching, Stanley Dural Jr. stood at the center of the broadcast strapped to a 30-pound piano accordion playing Louisiana Creole dance music. This episode traces how Buckwheat Zydeco got there, starting in Lafayette in 1947 as one of 13 children picking cotton at age five, ignoring his father's traditional Creo...

In 1971 one of the biggest hits on the national R&B chart was produced, owned and controlled by a Black woman who had picked cotton in rural Mississippi a few decades earlier. This episode follows Denise LaSalle from her birth in July 1934 in LeFlore County, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers, through gospel choirs in Belzoni and a move to Chicago at 13 in the middle of the Great...

Dr. Feelgood still tours the world more than 50 years after forming, yet not a single original member is on stage. This episode asks what actually constitutes a band by tracing the group from its 1971 origins on Canvey Island, an industrial Essex landscape below sea level dominated by oil refineries. The original lineup of Lee Brilleaux on vocals, Wilko Johnson on guitar, John B. Sparko Sparks on...

What do you do when your entire band quits on the same day and forms a rival group that goes multi-platinum? If you are Kim Simmonds, you rebuild and keep playing. This deep dive traces the 57-year run of Savoy Brown, from a 1965 meeting at a Soho record shop with harmonica player John O'Leary to Simmonds's death in December 2022, and the dozens of musicians who cycled through the group while he r...

Roy Milton was born in Wynnewood, Oklahoma in July 1907, the same year the territory became a state, and his family's history is recorded in the Dawes Rolls with his mother listed as a Chickasaw freedman and his father as a non-citizen. This episode follows him from an Oklahoma reservation and the Ernie Fields territory band in Tulsa to Los Angeles in 1933, where he formed the Solid Senders with p...

Jerry Williams Jr. cut his first record at age 12 as Little Jerry, produced at Atlantic Records alongside Jerry Wexler, co-wrote a number two country hit for Johnny Paycheck, helped launch the electro-hop group that gave Dr. Dre his start, and later collaborated with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. He is also the man who posed in his underwear on a pile of garbage for the cover of his 1970 debut as Swa...

In an era of solo artists making hits inside a laptop, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks dissolved two successful bands to build a 12-piece ensemble with horns, two drummers, and a choir of harmony singers. This deep dive maps the biography of the Tedeschi Trucks Band, from the 2007 Soul Stew Revival trial run and the official 2010 launch in Jacksonville, Florida, to a debut album that peaked at num...

In late 1968, the manager of The Animals was held at gunpoint by Yakuza promoters in Japan and forced to sign a $25,000 IOU, which he quietly voided by writing that he signed under duress in English his captors could not read. The band fled the country, left their equipment behind, and dissolved. This deep dive traces the full life cycle of the group, from its 1962 formation in industrial Newcastl...

Most people know ZZ Top, but far fewer know Arzell J. Hill, the Texas singer whose stage name inspired the band's title. This deep dive follows ZZ Hill from gospel touring with the Spiritual Five in the 1950s to the Dallas club scene, a push from Otis Redding to go national, and a long, winding path through Kent, Capricorn, Mankind, United Artists, and Columbia Records before the pivot that define...

Ivory Joe Hunter performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Grand Ole Opry, was recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress as a teenager, spent a day at Graceland with Elvis Presley, and is estimated to have written around 7,000 songs. This deep dive tells the story of an East Texas musician who spent his life demolishing the walls between rhythm and blues, pop, and country, and whose...

At 14, Jason Ricci was fronting a punk band in Portland, Maine when his bandmates handed him a cheap harmonica so he would have something to do with his hands. His mother told him that if he was going to play it, he had to study the blues. This deep dive traces the path from that accident to a Grammy-winning session, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance, and a reputation as one of the most tec...

Picture the heaviest distorted guitar tone you can imagine, then drop it into a tiny Memphis room in 1950, played by one man who is also stomping a drum kit with his feet and blowing a harmonica held in a rack around his neck. That was Joe Hill Louis, born Lester Hill in 1921, and this deep dive assembles his biography from session logs and discography notes to show how an almost unknown musician...

In March 1999, an 80-year-old man with severe respiratory problems walked out of a Las Vegas hospital against medical advice and set off on foot into the desert heat, collapsing about two miles later. He was Joe Williams, the Grammy-winning featured singer of the Count Basie Orchestra and, to millions of television viewers, Grandpa Al Hanks on The Cosby Show. This deep dive uses that final act of...

Traditional electric blues is mapped to the Mississippi Delta, Chicago's South Side, and Memphis, not Boise, Idaho. Yet that is where John Nemeth, a Blues Music Award-winning vocalist and harmonica player, built his foundation. This deep dive tracks how a kid singing in an Idaho church choir became a fixture of the Billboard blues charts through relentless repetition and a series of calculated rel...

The first single ever certified platinum by the RIAA was not by Elvis, the Beatles, or Michael Jackson. It was Disco Lady, the 1976 hit by Johnnie Taylor, a gospel-trained soul singer from Crawfordsville, Arkansas. This deep dive explores how Taylor shapeshifted through gospel, rhythm and blues, Southern soul, and disco while surviving the deaths of his mentors and the collapse of the labels he re...

A teenager in the smartphone era clicks on a low-resolution video of Muddy Waters performing Hoochie Coochie Man, and his life changes course. This deep dive follows Jontavious Willis, born in 1996 in Greenville, Georgia, from singing gospel with his grandfather at Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church to becoming a Grammy-nominated performer celebrated as a torchbearer for traditional country blues. We lo...

Rebecca and Megan Lovell spent their teens playing acoustic bluegrass as the Lovell Sisters, touring for four years, performing on A Prairie Home Companion, and playing the Grand Ole Opry and Bonnaroo. In December 2009 they broke up the band, and a month later they returned as Larkin Poe, named for an ancestor who was a cousin of Edgar Allan Poe. This deep dive maps their evolution from acoustic p...

After eight-hour shifts on a General Motors assembly line in Michigan, Larry McCray drove to a friend's Detroit basement to record the tracks that became his 1991 debut album, Ambition. This deep dive traces his journey from a farm in Magnolia, Arkansas, where he was the second youngest of nine children, to the top of the blues charts, with a focus on how each physical environment shaped the way h...

Born Elizabeth Mary Landreaux in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans in 1895, Lizzie Miles grew up speaking Louisiana Creole, sang in the Catholic church, and as a teenager performed at dances with King Oliver and Bunk Johnson. This deep dive follows her 50-year survival story through segregated minstrel circuits, the 1918 flu pandemic that killed her bandleader husband, the race reco...

Lou Ann Barton was born in Fort Worth in 1954 and became a defining voice of the Austin blues scene. In September 1977 she joined the Triple Threat Revue alongside Stevie Ray Vaughan and W.C. Clark, stayed on as primary vocalist when the group became Double Trouble in 1978, and then left in November 1979, just before the band reached global fame. This episode follows her from the sweaty stages of...

Louis Westcott Myers was born in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, in September 1872, earned his bachelor's and law degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Phi Beta Kappa, and practiced in Madison and Chicago before making a risky move to frontier-era Los Angeles in 1898. After 15 years in private practice he was appointed to the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1913, then won election to kee...

Luther Tucker was born in Memphis on January 20, 1936, played his first guitar built by his carpenter father, and received a Sears Silvertone from his boogie-woogie pianist mother, who bought it to keep him out of trouble. After the family moved to Chicago when he was nine, he came up alongside Freddie King, Magic Sam, and Otis Rush, and at 16 fell under the wing of Robert Lockwood Jr., who went t...

Most people know Maria Muldaur for Midnight at the Oasis, the 1973 hit that reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100. But this episode argues the pop moment was a brief detour in a lifelong mission to translate early American roots music for new generations. Born Maria Grazia Rosa Domenica D'Amato in 1942 and raised in Greenwich Village, she absorbed Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Bob Wills, Muddy...