Let It Roll EXTRA

Nate Wilcox

Nate Wilcox's "Let it Roll" is a podcast about the history of popular music from the 19th Century to the 21st.

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Yesterday · 39 min
Milton Brown Mentored Bob Wills and Invented Western Swing: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 5.1
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Milton Brown never had a national hit and never wrote a famous song, and he was dead at 32. But Cary Ginell argues that he did something almost nobody in popular music has done: he invented a genre single-handed. He took the Texas fiddle band, put a singer out front, added a slapped string bass, a piano and an electric steel guitar, fed it hot jazz and pop, and moved it out of the house dance and into the ballroom. We call it western swing. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Cary Ginell, author of “Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing,” in a conversation from the Let It Roll archive, returning now to open Season 5 of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. They start in Fort Worth, where Milton met a fiddle-and-guitar duo, Bob Wills and Herman Arnspiger, at a house dance and started singing “St. Louis Blues” with them. Cary explains how the trio became the Light Crust Doughboys under W. Lee O’Daniel, the flour-company manager who hated hillbilly music, banned the hot jazz, and used the band to launch his own political career - and why Milton, refused a raise and a paid spot for his kid brother Derwood, walked out on a Friday and was on a rival station the following Monday, while Wills stayed behind. Also: the Musical Brownies and the classically trained fiddlers who could improvise like Louis Armstrong when Wills could only play breakdowns; Fred Calhoun, the first regular piano player in a western band; Derwood Brown breaking guitar strings so often that a third Brown brother sat on the bandstand holding a spare; Bob Dunn, the hobo steel guitarist who learned to amplify his strings from a Black musician on the Atlantic City boardwalk and became the first western musician to play an electric instrument on record; Crystal Springs, the dance hall built over a gravel pit; the Bluebird A&R man who credited songs to a non-existent “Dan Parker”; 48 songs in three days for Decca in New Orleans; the Gene Autry picture and the Texas Centennial date Milton couldn’t afford to take; and the 1936 car crash that killed him, and what Cary’s interviews with the surviving Brownies say about it. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Yes Sir,” Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies * “Right or Wrong,” Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies * “Taking Off,” Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies * “Am I Blue,” Milton Brown and His Musical Brownies HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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Monday · 24 min
Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra and the Swing Era: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.12
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Benny Goodman’s band was too loud for America. Radio listeners complained, and on tour the audiences asked him to turn it down. Then one night in Oakland the quiet numbers went over fine, the band ran short of material, and they started on the wild stuff - and were met by a noise they couldn’t place. It was the kids on the dance floor going crazy. The crazier the kids got, the louder the band played. If the swing era had a birth point, Peter Doggett says, that was it. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes back Peter Doggett, author of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop Music,” in a conversation first released in 2019 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. It picks up where Peter’s Bing Crosby episode left off, moving from the radio era of the 1920s into the 1930s. They start with Show Boat, the first book musical, and the songwriters who followed - Cole Porter writing words and music alone, Rodgers and Hart introducing five future standards in a single 1937 show, and Hoagy Carmichael at the piano with a drummer for the first time, feeling “a perfect machine” place his fingers on keys he’d never played. Peter explains how Fred Astaire’s clipped, limited voice became one of the era’s most supple instruments, and why Louis Armstrong’s 1929 “St. Louis Blues” stood out from everything else he heard while working through the hits of the period in order - “touched by the future and electrified by it.” Also: how swing split the band into sections and gave the dance hall a show to watch; the Lindy Hop, and “jitterbug” as Harlem dancers’ slur for the white kids copying them; the rhumba and “The Peanut Vendor,” and Cole Porter writing “Begin the Beguine” for Xavier Cugat; the case for Glenn Miller, who boiled swing down to one riff everybody could dance to; Duke Ellington’s reach; Artie Shaw’s “straitjacket,” the night someone shouted “Artie, you stink,” and why Ellington could take his audience with him when Shaw couldn’t; Your Hit Parade, where a young Frank Sinatra got his first break, and the payola it invited; the jukebox putting dance bands out of work; and Melody Maker’s early jazz writer, who wanted his readers to know he was writing about polite white jazz, not the Black originals - and the British bandleaders who dropped their Jewish players, and their Gershwin and Irving Berlin, to play Berlin on the eve of war. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Night and Day,” Fred Astaire * “St. Louis Blues,” Louis Armstrong * “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” Duke Ellington * “In the Mood,” Glenn Miller Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
Friday · 39 min
Robert Johnson Revised: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.11
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Elijah Wald was teaching a class on the Delta blues in historical order. His students couldn’t wait to get to Robert Johnson. They loved Charley Patton, they loved Skip James and Son House - and when Johnson finally came on, the room sagged. The kid was good, but after Patton and James he wasn’t doing anything new. That letdown is how Wald came to understand why Johnson was barely noticed in his own day. Host Nate Wilcox brings back Dr. Yuri Campbell, scholar and musician, to weigh what the previous episode’s conversation with Elijah Wald about “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues” actually taught us. It returns now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic, and follows straight on from Wald’s own episode. Yuri explains why Johnson was the perfect blank slate for the folk and blues audiences of the 1960s - obscure, dead, few recordings and a dark sound - and why the blues itself was a brand-new form in the 1910s, not a survival from Africa. Nate lines up Johnson’s crossroads legend next to Charlie Parker’s woodshed year, and asks why a hugely successful Robert Johnson box set made Johnson an industry while Lonnie Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw stayed obscure. Also: how the record business went to the country only after the cities bought radios, then came back for the Delta on the strength of jukeboxes; why innovation in the blues stalled once the industry worked out what it could sell; genre as a cognitive shorthand; Texas Alexander and Lonnie Johnson’s “Levee Camp Moan” as a collision of the pre-modern and the modern; and the gravestone service where the Black locals laughed at “Terraplane Blues” while the white fans stayed solemn - with Nate’s story of N.W.A sweeping the metalheads of his border-Texas hometown. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Hellhound on My Trail,” Robert Johnson * “St. Louis Blues,” Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong * “Levee Camp Moan,” Texas Alexander with Lonnie Johnson * “It’s Tight Like That,” Tampa Red and Georgia Tom HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
October 28 · 38 min
Robert Johnson: Escaping the Delta: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.10
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In the film “The Search for Robert Johnson,” John Hammond asks Johnny Shines - Johnson’s traveling partner and friend - whether Johnson sold his soul to the devil. Shines holds out his hand. Give me your soul, he says. Go on, take it out of your body and hand it to me. You can’t do that. These are stories. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Elijah Wald, author of “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues,” in a conversation first released in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. Next time, in 4.11, Dr. Yuri Campbell joins Nate to look back on what this conversation taught us. Elijah explains why Johnson was a minor figure in his own day: the stars in his world were Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr and Peetie Wheatstraw, and what was exotic about Johnson to his neighbors was that he had traveled and sounded like the people on the records. He makes the case for “Terraplane Blues,” Johnson’s one near-hit, as a dirty, funny song that English kids five thousand miles away played dark and scary because they didn’t get the jokes - and for Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law, as the singer Johnson was trying to sound like. Also: how radio emptied the record market everywhere except the unelectrified countryside, and how jukeboxes came to take something like half of all the records sold in the late 1930s; Johnson as a human jukebox who could yodel a Jimmie Rodgers song for a white farmer; why the record collectors - in 1960 the only people who had heard any of this music - prized whatever was rarest, made Skip James a god and left Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leroy Carr behind; Big Bill Broonzy swapping his suits for work clothes for John Hammond, and Josh White’s smarter mix; H.C. Speir, the Jackson, Mississippi furniture-store man who all but invented Delta blues on record; and why the guitar, not the piano, became the fetish object of the British blues boom. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Downhearted Blues,” Bessie Smith * “Terraplane Blues,” Robert Johnson * “The Devil’s Son-in-Law,” Peetie Wheatstraw * “Devil Got My Woman,” Skip James HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
October 26 · 48 min
Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-War Blues of St. Louis: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.9
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In 1954 a St. Louis police detective named Charlie O’Brien went looking for the piano player Henry Brown, who by then was making his living in the numbers racket. Word got around that a cop was after him, and Brown kept slipping out the back door. O’Brien finally cornered him in a one-room flat on the second floor of a tenement and talked to the closed door: “Henry, I’m here to ask you about the blues records that you made.” The door creaked open. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Kevin Belford, artist, illustrator and author of “Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-War Blues Music of St. Louis, Missouri,” in a brand-new conversation recorded in October 2026. It joins Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic, just ahead of two episodes on Robert Johnson and the Delta. Kevin set out to paint a portrait series of his city’s blues musicians and found there wasn’t even a list of their names - so he went to the microfilm. He explains how the first writers on the blues, Lomax, Abbe Niles and Rudi Blesh, set rules that left St. Louis out: no city music, no comedy, no hokum, hardly any women. He sets W.C. Handy’s story of hearing the blues on the St. Louis levee in 1893 against his more famous Tutwiler, Mississippi, account a decade later, and asks why the St. Louis version was played down in Handy’s 1941 autobiography. Then the women who made the first blues records - Eva Taylor, Virginia Liston, Irene Scruggs and Josephine Baker’s start at the Booker Washington Theatre - and Lonnie Johnson, who won the theatre’s blues contest 18 weeks running and made 191 pre-war recordings. Also: the St. Louis school of guitar-and-piano duos; Henry Townsend decoding the pseudonyms on the old 78s, and why Roosevelt Sykes needed so many of them; record-store owner and talent scout Jesse Johnson; Jimmie Rodgers making a special trip to St. Louis to record with Clifford Gibson; Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law, cutting at least 160 sides through the Depression; Victoria Spivey; the original Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, School Girl” session with Big Joe Williams and Robert Nighthawk just before the Petrillo recording ban; how Bob Koester and Charlie O’Brien rescued the city’s legacy in the 1950s; and Kevin’s forthcoming book on the St. Louis music before the blues - “Duncan and Brady”, “Stagger Lee”, “Frankie and Johnny”, and “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.” Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “The Harlem Rag,” Tom Turpin * “You’ve Got the Right Key, But the Wrong Keyhole,” Virginia Liston * “Let Me Be Your Side Track,” Jimmie Rodgers with Clifford Gibson * “Good Morning, Little School Girl,” Sonny Boy Williamson HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
October 23 · 40 min
Chick Webb's Big Beat Style of Swing Led Directly to Rock 'n' Roll: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.8
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The band was auditioning for a Harlem club, and the drummer never showed up. A young hunchbacked drummer from Baltimore who had tagged along sat in instead. The club owner was so taken with him that he told the bandleader he could have the gig - but only if this guy was the drummer. That was Chick Webb’s first halfway steady job in New York. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Stephanie Stein Crease, author of “Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat That Changed America,” in a conversation first released in 2023 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. It follows straight on from Jeff Kaufman’s Savoy King episode, going deeper into Baltimore, the Harlem years and the band Chick built. Stephanie starts in Baltimore, a ragtime town with its own piano cutting contests, where Eubie Blake came up before heading to New York to work for James Reese Europe. She dug through city records and the 1910 census to show Chick was born in 1905, not 1909 as his death certificate and his tombstone say, and found no evidence that a fall down the family’s front steps caused his spinal tuberculosis - Baltimore was in the middle of a tuberculosis epidemic. Then there’s Blanche Calloway, who outshone everyone on a six-week, five-band battle tour in the fall of 1931 alongside Chick and the Bennie Moten band with a young William Basie on piano; and Chick’s best friend, the guitarist John Trueheart, who moved to Harlem with him, shared a room with him, and was finally billed beside him when the Harlem Stompers played back home. Also: how Chick took chances on young players like Cootie Williams, then let them go to Duke Ellington when Duke could pay better; the shuffle and backbeat Stephanie hears in Chick and Ella Fitzgerald’s records, years before Louis Jordan went out on his own; why jazz historians who wanted long solos wrote Chick down as a novelty act; the Savoy Ballroom’s benefits for the Scottsboro Boys and the Spanish Civil War; and Mario Bauza’s 1 a.m. audition, when Chick told him “you’re the man for me.” Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Harlem Congo,” Chick Webb and His Orchestra * “Down Home Rag,” Chick Webb and His Orchestra * “I’ll Chase the Blues Away,” Chick Webb’s Orchestra featuring Ella Fitzgerald * “F.D.R. Jones,” Chick Webb featuring Ella Fitzgerald HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
October 21 · 49 min
Swing King Chick Webb Brought Ella Fitzgerald to the World: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.7
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Near the end of a long tour, Louis Armstrong’s lip split open on stage. He was pushing for a high note and blood was running down his face. The musicians in the band were crying, but the drummer kept driving them until Armstrong hit the note and held it. The drummer was Chick Webb: four feet tall, crippled by spinal tuberculosis and in pain almost every night of his life. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Jeff Kaufman, director, writer and producer of the documentary film “The Savoy King: Chick Webb and the Music That Changed America,” in a conversation first released in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. This is Harlem’s swing era at its peak, and the bandleader at its center who is now nearly forgotten. Jeff starts in Baltimore. As a small boy Webb fell down a flight of stairs and broke his back. A doctor told him to play drums to build up his strength, and since the family couldn’t afford a kit, he practiced on garbage can lids with sticks he found in the street. He sold newspapers on a street corner, played on a segregated steamship with his lifelong friend, the guitarist John Trueheart, and came to New York at 17. There he won cutting contests against drummers who had laughed at him when he sat down. Duke Ellington handed him his first job as a bandleader, and he traded insults with Jelly Roll Morton on the sidewalk outside the clubs. At the Savoy Ballroom - two bandstands, room for 4,000 people, bouncers who threw troublemakers down the stairs - Black and white dancers could share the same floor, and Jeff calls it the first venue in America where that was true. Webb couldn’t read music, but he ran his band hard, and he hired a 17-year-old Brooklyn high-school kid named Van Alexander as an arranger. To pay him his first five dollars, Webb had to borrow the money. Jeff calls Webb the Louis Armstrong of the drums, the first modern drummer, and says he was the first Black artist with a national network radio show. He tells how Bardu Ali brought Webb a teenager who had just won amateur night at the Apollo singing “Judy.” She was living on the street, and Webb’s wife Sally taught her how to dress and do her hair. Ella Fitzgerald credited Webb all her life for teaching her how to make a career last. Also in this episode: how Louis Jordan tried to lure Ella away and lost his job over it; the Savoy battles of the bands against Benny Goodman and Count Basie; touring the South in 1938, where a rope was strung down the middle of the dance floor; and Webb’s death at Johns Hopkins in 1939. Jeff also tells about the day he filmed at Webb’s grave, and about the funeral, where Ella sang “My Buddy” and her voice cracked halfway through. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” Chick Webb and His Orchestra * “Rock It for Me,” Chick Webb’s Orchestra featuring Ella Fitzgerald * “Vote for Mr. Rhythm,” Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb * “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” Ella Fitzgerald and the Chick Webb Orchestra HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
October 19 · 43 min
Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Big Joe Turner: How Kansas City Vice Birthed Kansas City Jazz: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.6
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com At the Sunset Club on 12th Street the joint never closed. Big Joe Turner tended bar and shouted the blues while he poured, Pete Johnson pounded the piano, and by sunup there could be fifteen musicians on the stage jamming. The club had a speaker out on the sidewalk, but Joe didn’t need it. Andy Kirk said he never had to go to the Sunset, because the Sunset came to him - he lived a few blocks away and could hear Joe through his apartment wall. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Chuck Haddix, co-author with Frank Driggs of “Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History,” in a conversation first released in 2020 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. This is the story of how one wide-open Midwestern town got from ragtime to bebop in twenty years, and set up swing, jump blues and rock and roll on the way. As Chuck tells it, it all runs on vice. Boss Tom Pendergast’s political machine let the gambling, the liquor and the bordellos run, and that opened hundreds of clubs and ballrooms - Mary Lou Williams counted fifty clubs with live music in six blocks. Kansas City was a railroad hub and the first stop out of the Deep South, so through the Depression the territory bands kept coming in from the Southwest to where the work was. Chuck traces the walking bass from Blind Boone’s sheet music to Walter Page’s string bass, the switch from two-four to four-four that became the Kansas City signature. Then he turns to Bennie Moten, the father of Kansas City jazz and a better businessman than pianist, and Moten’s flashier rival, George E. Lee, whose first recording of “St. James Infirmary” was a local hit before Cab Calloway took it national. Also: Count Basie’s coup against Moten, and what Basie’s own memoir leaves out; Dave Dexter - the Capitol Records villain of the Beatles story - as the hero who steered John Hammond to Basie at the Reno Club; Jesse Stone and Big Joe Turner rocking and rolling on 12th Street in the 1930s; the bandleader at the Backbiters Club so scared of the gangsters he carried a gun and shot his own toes off; Pendergast’s fall in 1938 and the reformers who dried up the work; and Charlie Parker in the Reno Club balcony with the ladies of the night, listening to Lester Young through the reefer smoke, before Jay McShann got him out of town. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Twelfth Street Rag,” Bennie Moten * “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” Count Basie * “St. James Infirmary Blues,” George E. Lee * “Swingmatism,” Jay McShann with Charlie Parker HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
October 16 · 47 min
Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Josh White & Jean Ritchie and the first Folk Revival: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.5
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Jean Ritchie learned the old ballads the old way - at home in eastern Kentucky, from her own family, songs that had come down through generations. She may have been the last important singer who did. And the folklorist Maud Karpeles ruled that she could not be called a folk singer. Her offense? She went to college. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music,” in a conversation first released in 2025 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by subject matter. This is the moment the old ballads stopped passing from grandparent to grandchild and started arriving by record, radio and movie soundtrack - the run-up to the first folk revival. It starts with Alan Lomax: 17,000 recordings, fifty years in the field, and a CBS radio show for schoolchildren, for which he got the modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger - Pete Seeger’s stepmother - to set folk tunes for orchestra years before anyone else thought to. His two-volume set of Child ballads sung by the people he found in the fields was the first time the general public could buy them. Then Ewan MacColl, the left-wing enforcer of the British folk clubs: ballads were to be sung unaccompanied, by someone from the culture that made them - a rule that meant his American partner, Peggy Seeger, could not sing English songs in his club. Plus the ballad that shocked Professor Child himself, and Peter Kennedy, the BBC collector who, the stories go, had the singers he recorded sign their songs away. Also: Jean Ritchie’s scholarship to trace her family’s songs back to Britain, and why the woman who helped create the folk boom was already old-fashioned by the time it arrived; Josh White singing a Child ballad in a Randolph Scott western; Ritchie Blackmore first hearing “Barbara Allen” in Tom Brown’s School Days; a teenage Judy Collins, who bought the 78 of “The Whistling Gypsy” and sat on it the same day; Jo Stafford’s 1948 album of American folk songs; and Pete Seeger, the axe, and Newport. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Rissolty, Rossolty,” Ruth Crawford Seeger - the Schoenberg Ensemble, conducted by Oliver Knussen * “The Keach in the Creel,” Ewan MacColl * “The Little Devils,” Jean Ritchie * “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” Josh White Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
- Transcript
October 14 · 52 min
Rhythm & Blues from Bessie Smith to Louis Jordan: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.4
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In 1946 Louis Jordan had the number one record on the R&B chart for most of the year. He crossed over to pop, he was in the movies, Chuck Berry admitted to the day he died that Jordan was who he had set out to be - and Jordan lived until 1975 and could not buy a hit. Ed Ward knew why. “The clown always winds up hurting himself,” he says. “When they stop laughing, you’re dead.” Host Nate Wilcox and the late Ed Ward, author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume One: 1920-1963,” continue Season 4 of Let It Roll From the Beginning... with a conversation first recorded in 2018. This is the gap between the 1920s and the birth of rock and roll: how African American pop music went from the blues queens through the swing era to rhythm and blues. It starts with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith - professional entertainers in gowns and fake jewelry, singing with horn bands, a long way from the lone man with a guitar most people now picture when they hear the word blues. Then the Depression, which wiped out the market for both, and John Hammond, who got Bessie Smith one last session with an integrated band of A-list players, and then spread a story about her death that was not true. The sharpest point in the hour: collectors turned the records they could not find into legends and forgot the ones everybody already owned. Skip James sold a few records and became a myth. Leroy Carr sold millions, shaped Charles Brown, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, and got forgotten. Also: the Bluebird label’s house band and Big Bill Broonzy’s career-long claim to be the last Delta bluesman alive; Georgia Tom, who became Thomas A. Dorsey; boogie-woogie at Carnegie Hall’s From Spirituals to Swing; Lonnie Johnson, who held his own with Eddie Lang and retired to work as a hotel doorman; T-Bone Walker, single-note guitar and the night Ed watched a pickup band mock him behind his back at Max’s Kansas City; Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home”; and Nat King Cole, who refused to stay in South Central. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Bessie Smith, “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer” * Leroy Carr with Scrapper Blackwell, “How Long, How Long Blues” * T-Bone Walker, “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)” * Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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October 12 · 36 min
The Songs Jazz is Built On: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.3
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Show up to a jazz gig and there is no rehearsal. The bandleader calls a tune and expects you to know it, and if you don’t, you are not working next week. Ted Gioia used to write lists of those tunes for his piano students - what to learn, in what key - until he realised nobody had ever written the book. So he did. Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Ted Gioia, author of “The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened. Nate and Ted take four songs and hear each one twice. “St. Louis Blues,” the song that carried the blues into mainstream American pop, starting with W.C. Handy in a Mississippi train station around 1903, listening to a man play guitar with a knife - heard first as Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, then as Django Reinhardt made it over in Paris. “I Got Rhythm,” one of the simplest songs Gershwin ever wrote, and the reason it became the most borrowed chord progression in jazz, under “Cotton Tail,” “Anthropology,” “Oleo” and “Rhythm-a-Ning.” Also: Jerome Kern, who hated jazz musicians playing his songs - and whose estate, Ted notes, has never sent back a royalty check; Benny Goodman, the biggest pop star in America, commissioning Bartok and Copland; how “Night Train” came out of Duke Ellington’s band; Dave Brubeck refusing to play “Take Five” the same way twice; why “Donna Lee” may really be Miles Davis’s; and why Burt Bacharach’s songs scare jazz players off. After the paywall: Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” turning into the R&B smash “The Hucklebuck” (danced on The Honeymooners), “Donna Lee,” Monk, Mingus and Bacharach, and “My Favorite Things,” from Julie Andrews singing it to children to John Coltrane “exploding it into a million beautiful pieces” - plus Ted’s one wish for jazz, that its musicians would start playing each other’s songs again. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “St. Louis Blues,” Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong * “St. Louis Blues,” Django Reinhardt * “I Got Rhythm,” Louis Armstrong * “I Got Rhythm,” The Esquire All-Stars * “Now’s the Time,” Charlie Parker * “The Hucklebuck,” Paul Williams * “My Favorite Things,” Julie Andrews - The Sound of Music * “My Favorite Things,” John Coltrane Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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October 9 · 47 min
Record Men From Thomas Edison to John Hammond & Chris Blackwell: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.2
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Gareth Murphy set out to write an obituary for the record man. A French label boss had told him over lunch that the record producer was a dying breed, and in the 2010s, with the industry shrinking every year since 1999, it looked like he was right. Then Murphy went back to the beginning, found the same collapse in the 1920s and again in the Depression, and came out the other side with the opposite conclusion: the record business is cyclical, it has to go extinct now and then, and it always comes back. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Gareth Murphy, author of “Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry,” in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning. It starts with Thomas Edison, who Murphy suspects did not invent half of what he patented, losing the format war to Emile Berliner and the Victor Talking Machine Company - not on technology but on content, because Victor found Enrico Caruso, the first superstar of the recording age, and hid the ugly horn inside a cabinet so women would let it into the parlor. The pitch was opera at home - high culture for people who could never afford a seat - and, as Nate puts it, opera then was not just high culture but mass culture: Caruso moved millions of records. Then John Hammond, the rich kid who did not need a salary and so could afford to be right: Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman’s integrated bands, From Spirituals to Swing at Carnegie Hall, and, years later at Columbia under his old friend Goddard Lieberson, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan. Also Mitch Miller, who Nate argues invented studio recording as we know it, and the jukebox, the shellac shortage and the musicians’ strike that remade the business in the 1940s. Then the indies, and Britain: Chris Blackwell of Island Records - born in Jamaica, half Sephardic and half Irish, raised around Ian Fleming - and the long slog of breaking Bob Marley, which finally happened by way of Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” Murphy on why every English label that tried to conquer America nearly went broke doing it, and on the Go-Go film that almost sank Island. After the paywall: Geoff Travis and Rough Trade, the indie distribution network that built the Smiths, New Order and Depeche Mode and was then killed by its own success; Martin Mills and Beggars Banquet, the survivors; and why Murphy thinks streaming has already brought the record business back to life. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “E lucevan le stelle,” Enrico Caruso * “God Bless the Child,” Billie Holiday * “Concrete Jungle,” Bob Marley and the Wailers * “How Soon Is Now?,” The Smiths Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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October 7 · 41 min
Bing Crosby's Swing Brought Him Superstardom: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.1
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Gary Giddins agreed to write a 300-page Bing Crosby book in three years so he could get back to Duke Ellington. That was more than twenty-five years ago. He started out half-believing the hatchet jobs and found instead a man the people he interviewed kept calling the nicest, kindest and most generous they ever worked with, a Republican who was ahead of …
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October 5 · 35 min
The Pop Jazz Age From the ODJB to Bing Crosby: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.12
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In 1917 a white New Orleans band that was not the original anything and could not spell its own genre put out a record that sounded, in Peter Doggett’s words, like “a gang of crazed instrumentalists fighting for supremacy.” Within ten years the microphone had made it possible to sing in a whisper, radio had put that whisper in millions of private rooms, and the loudest music in America had become the most intimate. Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Peter Doggett, author of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop Music,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 and returning now to conclude season 3 of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened. It starts with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who got to record first because the Black New Orleans bands they copied turned the chance down rather than give their secrets away, and whose “Livery Stable Blues” hit Britain the way the Sex Pistols would sixty years later. Then the taming: Paul Whiteman, Ferde Grofe’s arrangements and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Gershwin nearly forgot to write and which the critics of both camps thought was a perversion of the music they loved. Then the machine that changed singing. Electrical recording let a vocalist lean in to the microphone instead of shouting over the band, and the crooner was born - Rudy Vallee, who had needed a megaphone to be heard, and Bing Crosby, who Artie Shaw called “the first hip white person born in the United States.” Peter, who grew up thinking Crosby was the squarest man alive, explains why he changed his mind. Also: why the ukulele was everywhere in the 1920s, the Prince of Wales sitting in on drums with London jazz bands, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s refusal to sound like American radio, and George Formby’s banned and filthy ukulele songs - which George Harrison loved to the end of his life. After the paywall: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and the Depression, which wiped out the record business and left radio standing; the coming of sound to the movies and what The Jazz Singer looks like now; the only film footage of Bessie Smith and Jimmie Rodgers, and why it exists at all; and a seven-year-old Sammy Davis Jr. in “Rufus Jones for President.” MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Livery Stable Blues,” Original Dixieland Jazz Band * “Rhapsody in Blue,” Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra - a George Gershwin composition * “With My Little Ukulele in My Hand,” George Formby * “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” Bing Crosby Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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October 2 · 43 min
Thomas A. Dorsey Went From 'It's Tight Like That' to 'Precious Lord': Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.11
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The same man wrote “It’s Tight Like That” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” As Georgia Tom, Thomas A. Dorsey cut it with Tampa Red in 1928 - one of the dirtiest hits of the decade, and the record that set off the hokum craze. As Thomas A. Dorsey, he wrote the song Mahalia Jackson sang at Martin Luther King’s funeral. And the order is not the one you would guess: “It’s Tight Like That” came after his religious conversion, not before it, because the church songs were not paying and he had a wife to feed. Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Garrett Cash for the fourth installment of HolyRoll, their history of gospel music, in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened. The book under discussion is Michael W. Harris’s “The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church,” with Anthony Heilbut’s “The Gospel Sound” and Robert Darden’s “People Get Ready!” alongside it. Garrett found Dorsey by accident, on a Georgia historical marker in Villa Rica, where he stopped expecting a Civil War battle and wondered for a moment whether the big band leader Tommy Dorsey had been born down the road. Nate’s own discovery was stranger: that music which seems as old as the church itself has a starting point, and that it came as late as the early 1930s. Dorsey was a preacher’s son and a church organist’s son who moved to Atlanta, learned soft piano in houses where couples danced quietly, and then went north in the Great Migration and watched Chicago fill up with the up-tempo New Orleans jazz of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, which left his own style hopelessly out of date. He worked his way back up as Ma Rainey’s bandleader, collapsed into a depression that stopped him performing for something like eighteen months, and came out of it by way of a preacher who, the story goes, pulled a snake out of his mouth. What followed is the story Harris tells: the Black churches of the North had spent two generations stamping out the call and response and the shouting of the old brush arbor meetings in favour of anthems and classical choral music, and the migrants filling their pews wanted it back. Dorsey gave it to them, got thrown out of the best churches in the country for it, and inside a few years had taken them over. Then his wife Nettie died in childbirth while he was away singing in St. Louis, and their baby son died the next day. A friend sat him at a piano to take his mind off it, and out of an old hymn tune he made “Precious Lord.” Also: Willie Mae Ford Smith and the National Baptist Convention of 1930; Theodore Frye, the strutting preacher who became his first partner; Sallie Martin, who fixed his business; why Dorsey was selling sheet music rather than records through the Depression; and the documentary “Say Amen, Somebody,” which Nate recommends without reservation. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “It’s Tight Like That”, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, * “Rock Me” Sister Rosetta Tharpe with Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra, * “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)” Elvis Presley * “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” Mahalia Jackson This episode originally dropped in 2022. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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September 30 · 38 min
Ralph Peer Brought Blues, Jazz, Country, and Latin Music to Record: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.10
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Before OKeh would bet on records made by Black artists for Black buyers, somebody had to go and find out whether that market existed. The company sent Ralph Peer. He went into barbershops and pool halls and asked people whether they would buy records made by their own artists, and came back with the answer: yes, they will. That is Barry Mazor’s account of how Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” got made in 1920 - not the story Perry Bradford told for the rest of his life, and Barry has a line for that: the least-heard sentence in the history of music is “I don’t deserve that much credit for this.” Host Nate Wilcox is joined by Barry Mazor, author of “Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music,” in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened. Bristol, Barry points out, is two weeks in a fifty-year career. Peer was not a folklorist and never pretended to be one; the Lomaxes carried a recorder in the trunk of a car, while Peer hauled equipment Barry compares to a mainframe computer, and he went looking for novelty rather than for survivals. He was the son of a sewing-machine salesman in Independence, Missouri, who started stocking Columbia talking machines, and by the age of ten Ralph was riding the trolley down to the Columbia warehouse in Kansas City to fetch records for the store. He stayed in the business for the rest of his life. Nate runs through the list of what Peer recorded at OKeh and then at Victor, and it is hard to believe it is one man’s work: Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Sylvester Weaver’s “Guitar Rag,” Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, the Memphis Jug Band, Blind Willie McTell, one of the first Cajun records ever made, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and then the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. He put Rodgers in the studio with Louis Armstrong. He put Fats Waller in front of Eddie Condon, Jack Teagarden and Gene Krupa. And Barry makes the case that none of it rested on Peer’s own taste - he once said it was almost important not to know too much about the music, because you could get caught up in it. What it rested on was the song. Barry explains why the record business ignored roots music for thirty years - the money was in sheet music, sheet music needed buyers who could read notes, and the big labels sold records the way Britannica sold encyclopedias, as self-improvement - and why Peer saw that the real money was in the publishing. Sara Carter did not want to sing “Single Girl, Married Girl.” Peer picked it on a day A.P. had wandered off, and she laughed about it for years afterward: whatever song she didn’t like but he told her to do turned out to be their biggest seller. Also: the “Wreck of the Old 97” lawsuit, and the misheard word in Vernon Dalhart’s record that proved who copied whom; the Depression, when Jimmie Rodgers went from 500,000 copies to 5,000 and Peer wrote to tell him he was still top of the heap, but the heap was a lot shorter; and how Peer walked away from Victor owning his own publishing company. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” Sara Martin, with Fats Waller on piano * “Single Girl, Married Girl” The Carter Family * “Cocaine Habit Blues” The Memphis Jug Band * “Besame Mucho” Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with Bob Eberly and Kitty Kallen This episode originally dropped in 2022. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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September 28 · 47 min
The Beginnings of Country Music According to Ken Burns: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.9
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Ralph Peer went to Victor with an offer no record man has made before or since: pay me a dollar a year, and let me keep the publishing. Victor took it. It looks like modesty and it was the opposite - publishing was where the money had always been, and Peer had worked out that the way to get rich in the record business was to own the songs rather than the sides. That is the deal underneath the Bristol sessions of 1927, and it is why Peer went looking for performers who wrote their own material instead of fiddlers playing tunes everybody already owned. The reason American law protects songwriters so fiercely in the first place traces back to Stephen Foster dying a pauper at thirty-eight - the foundational trauma of the American music business, and the thing every statute since has been bending over backwards to prevent happening again. Host Nate Wilcox is joined by James Porter - Chicago writer, DJ and musician - to open CountryRoll, their run through Ken Burns’s “ series, in a conversation first recorded in 2021 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened. Burns’s lodestar here is Bill C. Malone, whose “Country Music U.S.A.” is the book the whole field still argues with, and the series takes his line: country is working-class music, a mix of labour songs, parlour ballads, fiddle tunes, Sunday hymns both Black and white, saloon music, barrio music and cowboy songs. James’s verdict is warmer than he expected to give. A lot of people went in braced for the worst, having found the jazz series skimmed a deep well - and there is always going to be somebody hollering that Burns forgot the one guy who had a hit on a truck-stop jukebox in 1962. But the case James makes is that the series is generous exactly where it matters most, on the Black musicians who were there from the start. DeFord Bailey is the proof. The harmonica player was the most featured artist in the early history of the Grand Ole Opry, and audiences who tuned in out of curiosity came away startled by how much airtime the series gives him. The harder point sits underneath it: the musical miscegenation was real and the social equality was not. James is a devoted collector of old-time string band reissues and puts it plainly - you will be grooving along to a banjo riff and a guitar riff and then, out of nowhere, the lyric turns, and if you keep listening it gets worse. Both things are true at once, and the episode does not let either off the hook. The two acts Burns builds the hour on are the obvious ones and, James argues, the right ones. The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers between them cover the whole industry: Peer, the portable recording rig, the publishing, the songs. Nate reaches for the Beatles-and-Stones comparison and James takes it, with the caveat that nobody knows what John Lennon would make of being the Carter Family in that equation. What separates them is temperament. Rodgers was showbiz before he was famous - the man in the railroad cap and dirty denim was competing directly with Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo, which is not what the photographs lead you to expect. The Carter Family were the opposite, the first superstars entirely unspoiled by celebrity, reaching millions a week off border radio and never once becoming show people. And then the omissions, which is where James gets exercised and where this episode earns its place in the run. Burns mentions Charlie Poole. He does not mention Gid Tanner, or the Skillet Lickers, or Riley Puckett - one of James’s favourites from the era and, he says, about the most gifted of them. Nor Vernon Dalhart, who was competing with the crooners and selling pop units, the Eddy Arnold of his day, with “The Prisoner’s Song.” The thread tying those names together is the one the series is least comfortable with: a great deal of what these people sang was not folk music at all. Track the repertoire and you find show tunes from the 1880s and 1890s - country, once again, being pop. Also: the acetates that went straight to the radio before anybody thought to press them; what the labels meant by their “race” series and their “hillbilly” series, and who decided which was which; Eck Robertson’s 1922 fiddle sides that did not sell and Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1923 Atlanta record that did; Peer discovering Louis Armstrong later on; Ernest Stoneman’s royalty check as the thing that brought the rush to Bristol; and the Scots-Irish inheritance running under all of it. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Fiddlin’ John Carson, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” * DeFord Bailey, “Fox Chase” * Jimmie Rodgers with Louis Armstrong, “Blue Yodel No. 9” * Riley Puckett, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” This episode originally dropped in 2021. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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September 25 · 32 min
Ed Ward on The Bristol Explosion: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.8
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Ralph Peer was not an employee of anybody. He was an independent contractor working exclusively for RCA Victor, and he had set up a publishing company - which meant he had a reason to look for performers who wrote their own material, and a reason to pass some of that money back to them. So in the summer of 1927 he printed leaflets, took out advertisements in the Bristol newspaper asking for old-time musicians, and set up a portable recording lathe in an old hat factory on State Street, a road with a state line running down the middle of it, Tennessee on one side and Virginia on the other. What brought the rush on was a local reporter sitting in on a Stoneman family session and noting that Pop Stoneman had made about $2,500 in royalties that year - an unimaginable sum then, and especially for hillbillies. Inside a fortnight Peer had recorded both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Host Nate Wilcox is joined by Ed Ward, his original co-host and the author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” for a conversation first recorded in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. Ed’s argument is a legal and commercial one rather than a musical one, and it is the spine of the episode: there had been country records before Bristol - Eck Robertson’s fiddle sides in 1922, Fiddlin’ John Carson out of Atlanta, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, Vernon Dalhart’s pop hits - but that music was largely traditional, and you could not copyright what everybody already played. What Peer found in Bristol was two songwriting and performing machines whose material could be arranged, credited and owned. “Not the birth of country music so much as the birth of the country music industry,” as Ed puts it, “which I think is a real distinction that has to be made.” Both acts got there on other people’s songs. A.P. Carter roamed the hills collecting material with Lesley Riddle, a Black musician who had a legitimate claim on co-writing credits that nobody in 1928 was sophisticated enough to give him - Riddle knew the Black churches where the sacred material was, and the sheet music aimed at middle-class Black and Black vaudeville audiences. Jimmie Rodgers had his sister-in-law Elsie McWilliams writing for him. And Maybelle Carter’s famously distinctive guitar style, Ed says flatly, is probably the only traditional thing about the way the Carter Family performed: it is church style, the way you lead a congregation that cannot read music or even shape notes - line the melody out on the bass strings, play it through once, and the congregation sings the words. The two acts diverge from there. The Carters were a self-contained group - Peer asked A.P. if he had some new songs, the lineup was set, and as Nate puts it, it was much more like the Beatles. Rodgers was the opposite: Peer, in Nate’s phrase, was constantly messing with the formula, lining up new bands and bringing in session musicians. One of them, almost at random, was a Hawaiian steel guitarist, which is how the steel guitar entered country music. Another was Louis Armstrong. Rodgers, as Ed and Nate put it, did not see a musical color line - he was grabbing bits of Black show business wholesale, and his yodel very likely came through Emmett Miller, the blackface vaudeville performer who cut the “Lovesick Blues” Hank Williams built his career on. Both men were around Asheville at the same time, and who got whose yodel is lost. Rodgers had good ears and bad lungs. Tuberculosis was diagnosed in 1924, took him off the railroad, and killed him in 1933 - after years of relentless touring and recording with a stretcher set up in the studio so he could lie down between takes. He is, Nate argues, American music’s consumptive romantic, the 19th century Chopin trope landing in the 20th, and the direct ancestor of Hank Williams, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse. Somebody - possibly Peer - told him the average life of a popular performer was three years. The Carter Family’s cross was domestic. A.P. and Sara’s marriage broke apart, and the act did not. They went to Del Rio, Texas, and broadcast from across the Mexican border on XERA, a transmitter so powerful it reached the Canadian north and carried the Carter Family to a teenage Bob Dylan in Hibbing, Minnesota. And it was on that border radio, in February 1939, that Sara dedicated a song to Coy Bayes, A.P.’s cousin, the man she had loved and given up. He was in California. He heard it, drove to the border, and she left - her family, the act, and the business - and married him. The rest is the argument the folk revival had with itself. Harry Smith put several Carter Family sides on the Anthology of American Folk Music and no Jimmie Rodgers at all, and Ed’s explanation is deflating and probably correct: Smith wanted Moe Asch to buy his record collection, Asch’s label was called Folkways, and old tunes were therefore folk music. Almost nothing on that anthology was folk music in any strict sense - it was country and blues show business. Mike Seeger took the accident seriously, went looking, found Lesley Riddle alive and brought him onto the folk circuit. John Cohen, his bandmate in the New Lost City Ramblers, did the documenting - Ed rates him an astonishing photographer of an Appalachia the country had decided to ignore. And by the 1960s the original Carter Family were filed as folk while Mother Maybelle and her daughters, on the Grand Ole Opry every week, were filed as country - the same family, sorted by category. Also: why both acts abandoned the fiddle that country music had run on; how the Depression turned record sales from a stream to a trickle while radio got cheaper; the case that the Carters and Rodgers kept Victor afloat; June Carter designated the comedian because she was the poorest singer, until she learned; and Mother Maybelle earning her name by saving Johnny Cash. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Eck Robertson, “Sallie Gooden” (Victor, 1922) * The Carter Family, “Wildwood Flower” (Victor, 1928) * The Carter Family, “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” * Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” (Victor, 1927) This episode originally dropped in 2018. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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September 23 · 49 min
The Carter Family popularized the Child Ballads and Burl Ives built a new tradition: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.7
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In August 1927 the Carter Family drove all day to Bristol, Virginia - Maybelle heavily pregnant, bouncing over rutted roads in a Model T that A.P. Carter had to repair two or three times on the way. At that first session they recorded “The Storms Are on the Ocean” - one of four Child ballads they would record in all, songs already three or four centuries old when they got to them. The songwriting credit on the record reads A.P. Carter. Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock,” for the next installment of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. The Carter Family and Songwriting Credit Dave insists the book is not a history of folk music. Nate’s reply is that he is going to use it as one anyway, and Dave’s counter is the best line in the episode: that’s because you made it a history. The credit question is where it starts. Traditional songs were fair game, because who is going to argue with you? And A.P. and Ralph Peer took the publishing between them, A.P. earning half a penny a record. Dave’s version of learning this is perfect: at fourteen he owned Physical Graffiti, heard “In My Time of Dying” credited to Led Zeppelin, then bought the first Bob Dylan album and found the same song on it, more than a decade earlier. How did Dylan record a Led Zeppelin song in 1962 and not credit them? The answer, in both cases, was royalties. What makes the Carters worth all this is that they were not raw. Dave’s comparison: the labels realized hillbilly music was the next big thing and started holding open auditions in city after city, so imagine a record company in 1977 calling an open audition for punk bands - and in walks the Moody Blues. Everyone else is doing anarchy in the hills of Appalachia and the Carters arrive with arrangements. Sara could stop a valley: people would walk across entire valleys if they heard she was singing on her porch on a Sunday afternoon. Maybelle was a great guitarist. And A.P.’s song-hunting partner was Lesley Riddle, a Black musician who went out collecting with him and taught Maybelle a good deal about picking. Swinging a Child Ballad Then the tradition goes somewhere nobody expected. In 1938 Maxine Sullivan, fresh from a hit with “Loch Lomond,” recorded a swing-jazz “Barbara Allen”; it was “Loch Lomond” she sang in the 1939 film St. Louis Blues. Dave has to correct Nate mid-conversation - “Loch Lomond” is a traditional Scottish song, not a Child ballad - and that correction is the point: most of these singers could not tell a Child ballad from any other old song, and cheerfully mixed them. “Barbara Allen” is probably the most recorded Child ballad of them all, with the possible exception of “Scarborough Fair,” and what sells Sullivan’s version is a single line: “young man, I think you’re dying,” which she delivers with everything she has. Across the Atlantic there is Phil Tanner, a Welsh pub singer in his seventies who sang English songs, whose wife ran the pub, and who was “discovered” at a local sing-song and brought to London - where he made the car stop outside Buckingham Palace so he could sing the national anthem at it. The BBC broadcast him in 1949, the letters poured in, and when they went back to Wales to record his whole show they brought a stack of blank discs and ran out, because Phil simply kept going. He died six months later, Britain’s first folk star. The collectors turn out to be as strange as the singers. Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp’s former assistant, came over to run a summer school at Massachusetts Agricultural College and gave herself a spare month for fieldwork - Montreal, Ontario, Nova Scotia, then a steamer to Newfoundland, armed with pen, paper and a typewriter and flatly refusing to record anybody. She came back with eight or nine local variants nobody had heard anywhere else, of “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” “The Unquiet Grave,” “Matty Groves,” “Long Lankin.” Nate’s phrase for the whole enterprise is a hall of mirrors: collectors would find a singer with a marvelous repertoire and then be disappointed to learn he had a college degree, which disqualified him as genuine folk. John Jacob Niles was a collector before he was a singer, writing down nursery rhymes and riddles as a child, and set on his course by hearing someone sing “Lord Bateman” while he was out with a surveying party in eastern Kentucky. Then there is his voice. Dave’s first encounter with it was a Newport recording he assumed was playing at the wrong speed, and it took him three listens to decide he did not hate it. Nate is blunter - to modern ears it sounds like caterwauling until you listen closely and realize the man is singing, in a register nobody knew was available. There is also a rumor, which Nate has not heard before, that Niles developed it by singing to dolphins. And then Burl Ives, who arrives as the safest, blandest pop-folk performer imaginable and leaves with the most complicated legacy of anyone here. He stuck with folk music when an NYU professor told him they did not want any of that around here, and he became a genuine star doing it. He also named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee - the exact opposite of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, who were persecuted for refusing. Dave’s claim is that Ives, more than anyone else in this story, encapsulates what happened to American traditional music after the war. There is a good argument in the middle of all this about whether the Child ballads belong to America at all. Woody Guthrie barely touched them, and Dave thinks he knows why: they would not serve the work. Guthrie was an entertainer, but also an advocate, and a murder ballad was not going to help. Dave’s answer to Nate’s skepticism is the thesis of the whole series - the ballads may have been written in Europe five centuries earlier, but they lived more vital lives here, particularly in the South, than they ever did in England or Scotland. They are a foundation stone of Americana. Nate concedes the point. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * The Carter Family, “The Storms Are on the Ocean” (Victor, 1927) * Maxine Sullivan, “Barbara Allen” - the swing version, from the 1939 film St. Louis Blues. * John Jacob Niles, “The Wife of Usher’s Well” * Burl Ives, “The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife” This episode originally dropped in 2025. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. HOW TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE IN YOUR OWN PODCAST APP Paid subscribers get the complete episode. It doesn’t come through Apple Podcasts or Spotify - those carry the free preview. To get the full-length episodes in whatever app you already use, set up your private feed: 1. Go to letitrollpodcast.substack.com and open your subscription page 2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed 3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link 4. Paste it into your podcast app - in Apple Podcasts that’s Library -> ... -> Add a Show by URL That link is yours alone, and every new full-length episode lands in it automatically. Or skip all that and use the Substack app - sign in and everything’s already there.
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September 21 · 57 min
Paul Whiteman Was the King of Jazz in 1925, to Music Critics: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.6
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Elijah Wald explains that pop music is what teenage girls like to dance to, and its history has almost all been written by men who had no dates in high school. His book is called “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll” but he might as well have called it “How Paul Whiteman Failed to Destroy Jazz.” Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Wald to make his case. The conversation first ran in 2018 and returns now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. Despite the title, which Wald admits is trolling, the central figure of the story is not a Beatle. It is Paul Whiteman. Ask a white American in 1925 what jazz was, who its biggest star was, who its most daring artist was, and you would have got the same answer three times: Paul Whiteman. He commissioned “Rhapsody in Blue” and premiered it, and Wald’s claim is that the piece did in 1924 exactly what Sergeant Pepper did in 1967 - it made middle-class listeners decide this music could be serious art. Then comes the part that should bother you. Whiteman got filed in the same drawer as Louis Armstrong and Count Basie, so as Black music became more and more prominent, he simply sounded pale next to it. With rock and roll we did the opposite: we took the white music that got ambitious and called it rock, and gave the Black music a different name. Which is why nobody ever has to ask whether Sergeant Pepper is better than James Brown Live at the Apollo. They were filed in different sections. The two things Wald puts at the center of the book are technology and dancing. Live music, then records, then radio, then jukeboxes, then long-playing records, then television - and each one changes not only what is possible but people’s relationship to everything that came before. Television did not just add pictures; it killed national radio, radio went local, and local stations started competing by playing music you could not see on TV. That, he argues, is a large part of how rock and roll happened. He starts the book in 1893 with “After the Ball” rather than fifty years earlier with Stephen Foster, and the reason is precise. Sheet music was the first means of mass production, but it was not the first technology - the piano is a technology, so is the guitar. He starts at the moment you could buy the sound itself instead of instructions for making it. Before that, music was something you did. To even play a duet, as he says, two people have to be in the room. And you could not hear anything twice, which is why music from before recording repeats itself so much: they played it, then played it again, because you were going home and would never hear it again. “Encore” did not mean another song. It meant that one, once more. John Philip Sousa saw where this was going and hated it. His essay on what he called mechanical music has a very specific nightmare - that people would stop singing to their children and put a record on instead, that the village band everyone played in would be replaced by a machine playing strangers. Wald’s verdict is that Sousa was right and was not even paranoid enough: he could not imagine people using music to shut the world out. From there the episode becomes a history of outsiders. Every professional musician was once a human jukebox, expected to play whatever was on the radio - Buddy Guy described how you walked into a Chicago bar, read the top ten off the jukebox and played those. Lawrence Welk having to deal with what Count Basie was doing, and Basie having to deal with Welk as well. Ragtime as the last style to sweep the country without white listeners wanting to be Black. The shift in what white America pictured when it thought of Black America, from the countryside to the city, and how “urban” became the word. James Reese Europe leading the best band in New York because Vernon Castle insisted on a Black orchestra. There is also a long and careful stretch on the ugliest material in American popular song, what it meant at the time, who wrote it and who bought it. Wald handles it without flinching and without excusing it. The back half belongs to Mitch Miller, who has the best claim to having invented the record as we understand it - the idea that a record need not document a performance that could ever happen live. Take a song from here, a singer from there, musicians who have never met, a harpsichord next to a steel guitar, and put a voice on top. Miller was also the first-call oboist in New York, played on Charlie Parker with Strings, recorded with Toscanini, and was completely cynical about the pop records he made. He thought they were trash. He knew exactly how to make that kind of trash. Which brings Wald to a line worth keeping: timely and timeless are both used as compliments, and they are opposites. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, with George Gershwin at the piano, “Rhapsody in Blue” (Victor, 1924) * George J. Gaskin, “After the Ball” (1893) * James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra, “Castle House Rag” * Paul Whiteman, “From Monday On” (Victor, 1928), with Bix Beiderbecke and a very young Bing Crosby The 2018 conversation plays no records, so Nate cued and introduced all four for this edition. This episode originally dropped in 2018. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.
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