pplpod

Angela Strehli did not just sing in the Austin blues scene; she helped build it. Born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1945, she taught herself bass guitar and harmonica before ever stepping up to a microphone, then took a 1966 trip to Chicago to see Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy in their electric element. Back in Texas she formed the Fabulous Rockets with Lewis Cowdery, sang backup for James Polk and the Brothers, worked with the band Storm alongside a young Jimmie Vaughan, and in 1972 co-founded Southern Feeling with W.C. Clark and Denny Freeman. When Clifford Antone opened his...

Ann Peebles had one of the most distinctive voices in Memphis soul and one of the biggest hits of the 1970s, then stepped away from the industry at the height of the disco era to prioritize her family. Born Ann Lee Peebles on April 27, 1947, in Kinloch, Missouri, the seventh of eleven children, she learned to sing in her father's church with the family's group, the Peebles Choir, which opened shows for Mahalia Jackson and the Soul Stirrers. By the mid-1960s she was working the St. Louis club circuit with bandleader Oliver Sain, and a 1968 visit to Memphis led...

In the early 1960s, when women in rhythm and blues were expected to stand at the microphone and sing other people's songs, a left-handed teenager from Beaumont, Texas, took the stage with an electric guitar flipped upside down and a number-one hit she wrote herself. Barbara Lynn, born in 1942, grew up singing in a Catholic parish choir while absorbing Guitar Slim, Jimmy Reed, Elvis Presley, and Brenda Lee from the radio. She moved from piano to guitar, formed an all-female band called Bobbie Lynn and Her Idols, and won local talent shows until singer Joe Barry told producer Huey...

The popular image of a 1930s Mississippi bluesman is a solitary figure pouring sorrow into a battered guitar, but one of the era's most prolific and commercially successful artists packed juke joints with clever, wink-and-nudge double entendres. This episode explores the life of Bo Carter, born around 1893 or 1894 in Bolton, Mississippi, into a musical family: his father Henderson, a former slave, was a skilled fiddler, his mother Eliza sang and played guitar, and his brothers Lonnie, Sam, and Harry all became musicians. Carter managed and played in the family group, the Mississippi Sheiks, alongside Lonnie, Sam, and friend Walter...

Bobby Charles wrote one of the most famous catchphrases in rock and roll, penned hits for his idol Fats Domino, performed at The Last Waltz, and still remained almost invisible to the public. Born in Abbeville, Louisiana, in 1938, he grew up on traditional Cajun music and the country storytelling of Hank Williams until, at fifteen, a Fats Domino performance rewired his sense of rhythm. Fusing Cajun and country melodies with rolling New Orleans rhythm and blues, he helped pioneer the genre known as swamp pop and wrote Later Alligator, which became a massive hit for Bill Haley and His...

Chris Smither's life shatters the expected bluesman origin story. Born in Miami in November 1944 to a father who was a professor of Spanish and Mexican culture and an uncle who was an award-winning musicologist, he lived in Ecuador, the Rio Grande Valley, New Orleans, and Paris, where his father brought him his first guitar from Spain. He won a New Orleans folk battle of the bands in 1960 and enrolled at the University of the Americas in Mexico City to study anthropology, until a friend played him Lightnin' Hopkins' Blues in My Bottle. After transferring to Tulane and discovering Mississippi...

Chris Thomas King played the soul-selling bluesman on screen, and then wrote a book arguing that the crossroads legend and the Mississippi Delta origin story are wrong. Born Derwood Christopher Thomas in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1962, he was the son of traditional blues musician Tabby Thomas, who ran a famous local club. Rather than preserve his father's music in amber, he dragged it into the hip-hop era with the 1994 RCA album 21st Century Blues From the Hood, described as the first sample-based, all-rap-and-blues concept album, and made the then-unheard-of move of taking control of his master recordings, founding 21st...

A teenager expelled from a theological seminary for playing ragtime piano went on to build the rhythmic engine of boogie-woogie and, decades later, the sound that unlocked Ray Charles. Charles Edward Davenport was born in Anniston, Alabama, in 1894, one of eight children, and started playing piano around age twelve over the objections of a father who sent him to seminary to cleanse the urge. After his expulsion he joined a traveling carnival, learning to play loud enough to compete with barkers and rides, then moved into vaudeville as an accompanist for singers Dora Carr and Ivy Smith, recording for...

Curley Weaver recorded for Columbia, Decca, and OKeh during the first commercial explosion of the blues, and still woke before dawn for manual labor and busked on Atlanta street corners to eat. Born March 25, 1906, in Covington, Georgia, and raised on a farm in Porterdale, he learned guitar from his mother, Savannah 'Dip' Weaver, a respected pianist and guitarist who also taught his friends Charlie Hicks and the future Barbecue Bob, with harmonica player Eddie Mapp rounding out a teenage group. Weaver moved to Atlanta in 1925 and entered the studio for the first time in 1928, going on to cut sides...

In 1962, a 22-year-old from a Texas bar band cornered John Lennon backstage at a UK club and gave him a harmonica lesson, and for Delbert McClinton that was barely the prologue. Born in Lubbock in 1940 and raised in Fort Worth from age eleven, he came up in the Straitjackets, a roadhouse band that backed touring giants like Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Jimmy Reed. His harmonica riff drove Bruce Channel's international smash Hey! Baby, and after a minor 1965 hit with the Ron-Dels, he relocated to Los Angeles in 1972, formed the duo Delbert and Glen with...

Dinah Washington could walk into a Las Vegas venue unannounced, claim the stage, and draw every performer on the strip to watch her work. This episode views her life through the lens of rebellion against categorization. Born Ruth Lee Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1924, she moved to Chicago with her family as a child, played piano for the choir at St. Luke's Baptist Church while still in elementary school, directed the choir as a teenager, and left high school to tour with the Sallie Martin gospel singers. After winning an amateur contest at the Regal Theater, she was performing...

Doyle Bramhall II plays a guitar flipped over for a left-hander with the strings left in place, so the thinnest string sits at the top and every bend has to be pulled toward the floor. This episode argues that his counterintuitive technique mirrors an entire career built on flipping a suffocating legacy on its head. Born in Dallas in 1968, he is the son of Doyle Bramhall Sr., a songwriter and drummer who played with Lightnin' Hopkins and Freddie King and was a lifelong collaborator of childhood friends Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan. By eighteen he was touring with the...

Picture a smoky late-1960s London club where the wall of rhythm and blues coming off the stage is produced by a single person: a bass drum pedal under his foot, a harmonica in a rack around his neck, and a vintage gold-top guitar in his hands. This episode traces the life of Anthony 'Duster' Bennett, born September 23, 1946, in Welshpool, Powys, who came up through the art school scenes of Kingston upon Thames and Guildford, worked as a session harmonica player in the early 1960s, and then, inspired by Jimmy Reed and Joe Hill Louis, adopted the punishing one-man-band...

Earl Hooker's warm-up instrumental was secretly recorded, sold to Chess Records, and released with Muddy Waters' vocals pasted over it as You Shook Me. Then he went back and did it again on purpose. Born in 1930 near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and raised in Chicago after his family joined the Great Migration, Hooker was a cousin of John Lee Hooker, picked up the guitar around age ten, and, because of a severe lifelong stutter, poured his voice into the instrument rather than singing. By twelve he was busking on Chicago street corners with Bo Diddley and riding streetcars all day playing...

At twelve years old, Eddie C. Campbell was standing in the shadows of Chicago blues clubs watching the hands of Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, and Otis Rush. Born in Duncan, Mississippi, on May 6, 1939, he moved with his family to Chicago in 1949, arriving with a decade of the acoustic rural South in his memory just as the electric West Side sound was being invented. This episode explains how plugging in changed the physics of guitar playing, and why Campbell spent two decades as a sideman for Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Little Johnny Taylor, and Jimmy Reed, holding the groove for...

When Eric Bibb was eleven and learning guitar, a family friend leaned over and told him to drop the flashy techniques and keep it simple. That friend was Bob Dylan. Born in New York City in the summer of 1951, Bibb was the son of folk and musical theater figure Leon Bibb, the nephew of Modern Jazz Quartet founder John Lewis, and the godson of Paul Robeson, with Pete Seeger among the regular visitors. He got his first steel-string guitar at eight, faked illness to stay home studying records by Odetta, Joan Baez, and the New Lost City Ramblers, played...

Floyd Dixon branded himself Mr. Magnificent, and this episode traces how the Texas-born pianist earned it. Born February 8, 1929 in Marshall, Texas, Dixon absorbed blues, gospel, jazz and country before his family moved to Los Angeles in 1942, where the smooth club style of Charles Brown became his template. After gigging with Eddie Williams and His Brown Buddies, he signed with Modern Records in 1949, charted with Dallas Blues and Mississippi Blues, and stepped into Charles Brown's old seat in Johnny Moore's Three Blazers, scoring a number four R&B hit with Telephone Blues before landing his own number four with Call...

Floyd Jones wrote a song that Canned Heat carried into the Billboard top 10 in 1968, yet when he died in 1989 the Chicago Tribune noted how little attention his passing received. This episode traces the bluesman from his birth in Marianna, Arkansas in July 1917 through an itinerant life in the Delta, where Howlin' Wolf handed him a guitar, to his 1945 arrival in Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Locked out of union venues, Jones played house parties and the open-air chaos of Maxwell Street, where running extension cords from apartment windows to cheap amplifiers accidentally created the distorted electric sound...

John Thurman Hunter Jr. was working in a Beaumont, Texas box factory when he saw B.B. King perform, bought his first guitar, and in that same year of 1953 released a single on Duke Records as Long John Hunter. This episode explains how that seemingly impossible timeline made sense in the raw, volume-driven R&B market run by Don Robey, and follows Hunter from his birth on July 13, 1931 in Ringgold, Louisiana and a farm childhood in Magnolia, Arkansas to the move that defined his sound: relocating to El Paso in 1957 and taking a residency at the Lobby Club in...

John Cephas was born in 1930 and raised in Bowling Green, Virginia; Phil Wiggins was born in 1954 in Washington, DC. Separated by 24 years, they met at a 1976 jam session at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife and, after an incubation period in pianist Big Chief Ellis's band, decided to continue as an acoustic guitar and harmonica duo. This episode breaks down what Piedmont blues actually is, with the thumb holding a ragtime-style bass line while the fingers pick a syncopated melody, and how Wiggins's harmonica functioned like a horn section weaving through Cephas's fingerpicking.We follow the duo...