pplpod

William Big Bill Morganfield is the son of McKinley Morganfield, known to the world as Muddy Waters, but this episode is about the decades he spent refusing the shortcut that name offered. Born in Chicago in 1956 and raised in southern Florida by his grandmother, Morganfield grew up on the Jackson 5 and James Brown, earned an English degree from Tuskegee and a communications degree from Auburn, and settled into life as a teacher. Only after his father's death in 1983 did he pick up the guitar seriously, spending six years learning the instrument as an adult before a well-received gig with...

Roebuck Pops Staples scored a Billboard number one pop hit the day before he turned 61, and this episode traces the life that made such a late peak possible. Born in December 1914 near Winona, Mississippi, the youngest of 14 children, he grew up on a cotton plantation near Drew with an eighth-grade education, absorbing the guitar language of Delta neighbors like Charley Patton while choosing the gospel path over the juke joint. After marrying Oceola in 1935 he moved to Chicago, worked the stockyards, construction sites and a steel mill, sang with the Trumpet Jubilees, and in 1948 formed the Staple Singers with...

Allen George Smith learned the harmonica from his mother at age four and spent his teens playing in a country band and a Mississippi gospel group before hitting a problem every street musician faced in the 1940s: nobody could hear him. This episode follows George Harmonica Smith from his birth on April 22, 1924 in West Helena, Arkansas and his upbringing in Cairo, Illinois to Rock Island, Illinois in 1941, where a day job at the Dixie Theater gave him access to an old film projector amplifier. Wiring a microphone to that salvaged amp pushed the tubes past their limits and produced...

In 1981 George Thorogood played all 50 US states in 50 days, squeezing in Washington, DC and Maryland on the same day for 51 shows. This episode uses that tour as a lens on a career built on physical stamina rather than trends. Born in February 1950 in Wilmington, Delaware, Thorogood played semi-professional baseball before a guitar slide gift and a 1970 John Hammond concert redirected him toward blues. We follow him from busking in San Francisco to playing behind Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and to the advice from Robert Lockwood Jr. that put a hollow-body electric guitar in his hands.With...

Graham Bond taught Deep Purple's Jon Lord the organ, suggested the name The Animals, employed Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and John McLaughlin before they were famous, and was the first rock artist to record with a Mellotron. This episode asks why a resume like that ended in obscurity. Born in 1937 in Romford, Essex and adopted from a Dr. Barnardo's home, Bond rose through the British jazz scene on saxophone, was voted Britain's new jazz star in 1961, then pivoted into Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, where he met Baker and Bruce and formed the Graham Bond Quartet.We explore...

In the early 1960s an elderly Gus Cannon pawned his banjo to pay a heating bill. Months later the Rooftop Singers took his song Walk Right In to number one, and he bought the banjo back. This episode traces the full arc behind that reversal, beginning on the Henderson Newell plantation in Red Banks, Mississippi, where records list his birth as 1883 while his tombstone says 1874. Sharecropping in Clarksdale at 12, he built his first banjo from a frying pan and a raccoon skin, taught himself a percussive downpicking style, and learned from fiddler Jim Turner and guitarist Alec Lee, whose...

Guy Davis learned fingerpicking on a train from Boston to New York by watching the hands of a stranger with nine fingers. This episode explores how the only son of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, born in 1952 in the New York City area, absorbed the rural South through his grandmother's speech and family stories, learned five-string banjo at a Vermont camp run by John Seeger, and refused formal lessons in favor of the oral, hand-to-hand tradition that originally carried the blues. We look at his 1980s acting career, including the film Beat Street and the role of Dr. Josh...

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 the instrument for flashy 30-second solos, he used breath patterns and mouth position to play chords and rhythm at once, turning a diatonic novelty into a chugging engine that could anchor an...

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 big band leaders like Frank Fairfax and Lucky Millinder, learning to manage the frequencies of 20 to 30 instruments, before taking a 1942 job as pianist and arranger for the Ink Spots, where four exposed vocal parts taught...

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 Creole accordion, and instead becoming a skilled R&B organist who backed Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles and Joe Tex before leading his own funk band, Buckwheat and the Hitchhikers, in 1971.The turning point came in 1976...

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 Migration. Working as a barmaid at Mix Lounge, she met Chess Records scout Billy The Kid Emerson, signed a one-year contract, and was shelved without recording a single session, a...

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 bass and John The Big Figure Martin on drums took its name from a 1962 Willie Perryman record and its attitude from the bleak early 1970s UK, becoming the kings of a pub rock...

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 pianist Camille Howard and helped define the sound that became jump blues.We unpack why wartime economics forced bands to shrink and play harder, how Milton pressed and sold...

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 remained the single constant.We look at the band's Chicago blues foundations, the deliberately plain name borrowed from Savoy Records, Decca's patience through several lean albums...

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 Swamp Dogg. This deep dive explains how those two facts belong to the same career.We trace the frustration that drove the transformation, including the 1968 Gene Pitney...

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 number 12 on the Billboard 200 and won the 2012 Grammy for Best Blues Album.We look at the mechanics of arranging a dozen musicians without producing sonic mud, the stage plot that...

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 Newcastle upon Tyne to that chaotic ending and the decades of reunions and lawsuits that followed.We break down why the transatlantic number one House of the Rising Sun worked...

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 defined his legacy.We examine why the slick New York disco-era production behind his 1977 hit Love Is So Good When You're Stealing It felt like a stylistic straitjacket...

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 given name really was Ivory Joe.We follow him from Kirbyville, Texas and a program manager job at radio station KFDM in Beaumont to Los Angeles in 1942...

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 technically advanced harmonica players of his generation.We explain the overblowing technique popularized by Howard Levy that turns a one-key diatonic...