Let It Roll EXTRA

Vernon Dalhart: The forgotten first superstar of country music: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.5

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The biggest-selling record in the United States in 1924 was a country record that was also the year’s biggest pop hit. It was “The Prisoner’s Song,” backed with “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and it was the first country record to sell a million copies. The man who sang it was born Marion Try Slaughter in Jefferson, in deep East Texas, trained at the Dallas Conservatory of Music, sang light opera in New York, and took his stage name off two towns in West Texas - Dalhart, at the very top of the Panhandle, and Vernon, just short of it. Three years before Ralph Peer ever got to Bristol, he had already opened the market that the Bristol sessions are given credit for. Host Nate Wilcox tells this one alone, as a Let It Roll seance - the guest is the late Jack Palmer, author of “Vernon Dalhart: First Star of Country Music,” who died before Nate could ever interview him. The episode 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 - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened. Palmer is the reason there is anything to say. He was born in 1924, went to the Second World War, came home and became a collector of 78s, and kept turning up Dalhart sides by a singer nobody had reissued. He was an amateur and not a professional scholar, and the book is the life’s work of a fan who decided the record needed correcting. It came out in the early 2000s, decades after Dalhart was finally elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1981 - long after Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, who came after him - and inducted by Dolly Parton. Nate took the book out on interlibrary loan and wants Palmer’s work to have a hearing. The family story is uglier than the music. Dalhart’s grandfather and namesake was a violent opponent of Reconstruction, probably a Klansman, a contemporary of the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin. His father, Robert Marion Slaughter, was a notorious knife fighter who was shot dead by his own brother-in-law, Bob Castleberry; no charges appear to have been filed, and his widow stayed on good terms with the brother who killed her husband, which tells you most of what Palmer could not document. Mother and son left Jefferson for Dallas, and that is where a singer got made. What made him is the part the story usually skips. Dalhart was a professionally trained tenor who did small parts in Madame Butterfly and in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, and he worked for Thomas Edison from 1916 to 1923, including the tone tests - Edison would put a live singer on a stage against one of his own records, behind a curtain, and dare the audience to say which was the machine. He cut somewhere between three and four hundred records of light classical material and dance-band vocals under a pile of names: Al Craver, Vernon Dale, Frank Evans, Hugh Latimer, Sid Turner, George White, Bob White. Singing on records in 1918 was a day job. You punched in, you sang, you got paid, and the brand was the song, not you. Then the industry discovered that Southern whites would buy records of their own music, having just discovered the same thing about Black listeners with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” and on Nate’s reading these are the same event. Eck Robertson’s fiddle sides were cut in 1922 and went nowhere much. Fiddlin’ John Carson sold. Henry Whitter, of Grayson and Whitter, cut “The Wreck of the Old 97” and made some waves without being much of a singer. Nat Shilkret at Victor wanted a country record, and Dalhart - a Southerner who knew the material - lobbied internally to be the man who made it. The B side needed filling, so he took a song his visiting cousin Guy Massey had picked up from a brother who learned it in prison, the two of them shaped it into a song, and they cut it with Carson Robison playing on it. Massey took the copyright credit and the small end of the royalties; Dalhart kept the bulk of them, and Massey was dead within a few years. The Robison partnership is the engine of the good years - “The Wreck of the Shenandoah,” “The Alabama Flood,” “The Wreck of the Number Nine,” a song about the Scopes trial, all of it topical material of a kind Pete Seeger would later have called folk. Robison played guitar and harmonica, whistled, sang harmony and wrote a great deal of it, and the Vernon Dalhart Trio with Adelyne Hood had a real run. Then Dalhart changed the trio’s personnel without consulting Robison, and the partnership did not survive it. That is the end of the line. The records sold less each year, the bookings thinned, and he had been retired for a decade when he died in 1948. There is no persona and no legend, which is exactly why he vanished: “The Prisoner’s Song” is more famous than the man who sang it. The last third is the argument Nate has been building across the whole series. Dalhart gets dinged for being operatic and therefore inauthentic, but operatic pop was not a highbrow sideline in the teens - Caruso was the biggest recording star in the country and something like a quarter of all records sold were opera. Verdi and Puccini sold tickets like pop acts. John McCormack was a star through the teens and twenties and a huge influence on Bing Crosby. Nelson Eddy came a decade later. In country music the pop-influenced strain runs from Eddy Arnold to Garth Brooks, always fighting the more rural, more Black-influenced strain, and it never loses. Nate’s specific beef is with Allen Lowe, who he rates as one of the best cataloguers of pre-1930 recordings alive and who he says systematically leaves the operatic singers out. Around that sits a broader complaint about a blind spot in the scholarship he has learned the most from - he names Ed Ward first, then Gary Giddins, Nelson George, Gerald Early - that the work of rightly elevating vernacular music wrote the trained singers out of the picture, and you cannot hear the whole story with that piece missing. It pops back up anyway, in Freddie Mercury and Rob Halford and, of all people, the trained opera singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. There is also a long, deliberately unflinching stretch on the ugliest corner of pre-1920s American popular song - the kind of material Dalhart and nearly everyone else was cutting before 1924, who wrote it, who bought it, and what was happening in the country while it sold in the millions. Nate makes the case for telling that record plainly rather than burying it, which is why it is here and not edited out. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Vernon Dalhart, “The Wreck of the Old 97” (Victor, 1924) * Vernon Dalhart, “The Prisoner’s Song” (Victor, 1924) - the B side, credited to his cousin Guy Massey * Vernon Dalhart, “Putting On the Style” - the skiffle song John Lennon sang with the Quarrymen before Paul McCartney joined * Vernon Dalhart, “Can’t Yo’ Heah Me Callin’, Caroline?” (Edison, 1918) - the record Dalhart called his own best * Vernon Dalhart, “Dardanella” - the operatic side This episode originally dropped in 2023. 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. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.

• Transcript

Ed Ward on Rock Pre-History the 1920s & 30s: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.4

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The date Ed Ward starts from is February 14th, 1920, and the principle he says the record business discovered that day was: record it and see if it sells. Mamie Smith had already cut sides that moved most of a hundred thousand copies. Then came “Crazy Blues,” and the sales figures Ed and Nate cite - 75,000 a month, a million inside a year - told the industry something it had not wanted to know: white people were buying a record the business had assumed only Black listeners would want. Host Nate Wilcox and the late Ed Ward, the rock historian of NPR’s Fresh Air kicked off their discussions of Ed’s History of Rock and Roll, Volume 1 1920-1963 with a discussion of the 1920s, when the record industry, reeling from the disruption of radio, accidentally discovered that recordings by Black and “hillbilly” artists moved units. The conversation first ran in 2018, and 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 subject matter. Almost nothing about that first hit is what the file card says. “Crazy Blues” is not a blues, as Ed explains: no AAB, no resolving third line, just blues elements inside a professional songwriter’s pop song, cut by a vaudeville singer with a working band behind her. Perry Bradford wrote and led it. The label was OKeh - the initials of the German immigrant who founded it, Otto K. E. Heinemann, who was also recording Ukrainian, Greek and Yiddish records on exactly the same logic, because nobody knew what would sell to whom and the only way to find out was to try. That accident set off everything. Ma Rainey, billed with Pa Rainey for years as the Destroyers of the Blues - not of the musical form, Ed thinks, but of yours: they were such an act that they would destroy your blues. The touring troupe that carried her later employed a kid named Rufus Thomas, who went from that world to Sam Phillips and “Bearcat” and then to Stax, which makes him, as Nate puts it, a one-man history of Memphis music. Then came J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, a Brown University graduate who played in the early National Football League, turned up in Chicago, and sold himself to Paramount Records as the man who understood a market they were ignoring. Paramount, Ed says, did not know what they were doing, and it is a good thing they didn’t - they would never have hired him otherwise. Williams never went scouting. He rode the railroad between Wisconsin and Chicago and let the talent come to him, and by Ed’s account it was on a Chicago street corner that he found Blind Lemon Jefferson - unique when he recorded, because nobody else was cutting the one-man, one-guitar Black blues record. Blind Lemon’s records were selling, and Paramount was actually paying him, which is what makes his death land the way it does. There was no reason, Ed says, for that man to have frozen to death on a street corner. Nate’s answer on the tape is that it continues all the way up to Amy Winehouse. The bifurcation the whole episode circles is the one between jazz and blues, and Ed’s argument is that at the time nobody saw it. His evidence is Lonnie Johnson - a blues guitarist of extraordinary fluidity who is playing on Duke Ellington’s “The Mooche,” trading a little dialogue with the orchestra in the middle of one of Ellington’s earliest hits. The line everyone now treats as permanent had not been drawn yet. Halfway through, the conversation crosses to white rural music and finds the same machinery running. It starts in 1922 with two fiddlers, Eck Robertson of Amarillo and Henry Gilliland, who spent fiddle-contest prize money on train fare to New York and turned up at Victor in a Union uniform and a Confederate uniform to announce that the South was united and they were the best fiddlers alive. Then Marion Try Slaughter, a Texan who took a stage name from two towns in his home state - Vernon and Dalhart - and recorded “The Prisoner’s Song,” a massive hit that was not rural music at all but a 1920s pop ballad sung in a Southern accent. It was, exactly, the “Crazy Blues” of country music: the record that opened a market by not being the thing the market was named after. That brings Ralph Peer to Bristol in 1927, a town with a state line running down the middle of its main street, where newspaper advertising brought in both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers inside a fortnight - which is why it gets called the big bang of country music. Ed’s insistence is that these people were not folk musicians but singer-songwriters, as deliberately commercial as anything Bing Crosby was doing. The Carters’ material came partly from their Black driver, who on the road, barred from the same hotels, would pick up songs in churches and bars and bring them back for A.P. Carter to arrange and copyright; Maybelle’s famously distinctive guitar style was, Ed notes, not distinctive at all to anyone who attended a Black church. And Jimmie Rodgers arrives as a one-man melting pot - Swiss yodelling, Hawaiian steel guitar, and a mass of African-American material absorbed as a sickly railroad man’s son hanging around his father’s white and Black co-workers. The last stretch runs to Bob Wills, who could neither sing nor play the fiddle especially well and so hired the best musicians he could afford, and whose obsession with the blues sent him straight to the record shops - Ed spent the better part of a week with the surviving Texas Playboys and got the story from the piano player. It ends on Louis Jordan, whose fast, funny, literate storytelling taught Chuck Berry how to write a song, and who Ed nearly saw perform: the booking was made, and Jordan died the week he was due. Along the way they get to how electrical recording ended the era of shouting into a horn and made Crosby’s crooning possible, and to Herb Jeffries, the Bronze Buckaroo, a Black singing cowboy who made Westerns for Black theatres.Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Mamie Smith, “Crazy Blues” (OKeh, 1920) * Duke Ellington, “The Mooche” (OKeh, 1928) * Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Matchbox Blues” (Paramount, 1927) * Vernon Dalhart, “The Prisoner’s Song” The free cut runs 40:12 and ends just before “The Prisoner’s Song.” Free listeners get three of the four records; the Dalhart and the last half hour - Bristol, the Carters, Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and Louis Jordan - are behind the paywall. 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 page2. Scroll down to Private podcast feed3. Click Set up podcast and copy the link4. 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.

The Holy Trinity of Texas Gospel and a Devilish Businessman: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.3

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Michael Corcoran’s method came from a piece of advice and a baseball adage. The advice was Mack McCormick’s - the great unpublished Robert Johnson biographer, who nearly shut the door in Corcoran’s face the first time he turned up. What Corcoran took from the evening was that if McCormick had already worked a subject, it was picked over, like arriving a…

The Grateful Dead were the pied pipers of psychedelics

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com “Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America” is not a band biography. It is a book about a substance and the country it moved through, and the Grateful Dead are the connecting thread rather than the subject - the vector, to borrow the word Ted Anthony used about Alan Lomax. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes author Jesse Jarnow who starts with the problem of scope, because you cannot write about every acid head in American history and Jarnow had to choose. What he chose was the line running from the first explosion of psychedelia in the 1960s all the way into the 21st century: the Dead, and then the internet, hip-hop, Keith Haring, electronic dance music, the jam bands and Burning Man, all of it connected by the same underground and often by the same people. They get to the Dead’s own strange relationship with capitalism - the band that built one of the most sophisticated commercial operations in American music while remaining, in most people’s minds, the opposite of a business. They get to the tape culture and the archive, and to Dick Latvala, whose Dick’s Picks made the live recordings a canon rather than a rumour. And they get to what Jarnow finds when he looks for the scene now, which is not a wake: there are still, in his words, fantastic weirdos out there doing interesting things with psychedelics, off the grid or on whatever grid they build for themselves. He says that makes him happy, and it is the last thing he says. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” The Grateful Dead’s first single * “Dark Star” - from “Live/Dead” * “Cassidy” - Bob Weir * “Here Comes Sunshine” - from Dick’s Picks Volume One, the song Dick Latvala chose to open his first compilation

Seance Roll 2: The agony of mid-20th century classical music

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com There is no guest on this one, and that is the point. The Seance Roll series is host Nate Wilcox in conversation with authors who are dead, or simply unreachable, whose work shaped his thinking anyway. Henry Pleasants was a music critic who lived from 1910 to 2000, and in 1955 he published “The Agony of Modern Music” - a polemical attack on where 20th-century classical music had gone and an argument that jazz was the true master music of the age. Its opening is not hedged: “Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for 300 years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through its slag pile.” Nate takes that seriously rather than dismissing it, and the episode is built out of the two halves of taking it seriously: playing the music Pleasants was condemning, and then asking what he could not see from 1955. So you get the Schoenberg violin concerto, Webern, Berg, Boulez - the actual sound of the thing being called a slag pile - and you get Gershwin as Pleasants’s counter-example. And then the trouble with the argument. Pleasants was writing at the moment jazz’s grip on the pop audience was already loosening; the apotheosis he was reaching for was the swing era, a decade behind him. He never really confronts the modernists - no Charlie Parker, no Dizzy Gillespie, no bebop, no Miles - let alone free jazz, and rock was not yet on anyone’s map. Which sets up the thought the episode keeps returning to: that jazz was about to run the same cycle Pleasants was condemning classical for - innovating so fast it lost the room - and that rock would run it again, faster, abdicating the dance floor with “Sgt. Pepper” just as Elijah Wald argued. The music that replaces the dead art has a habit of dying the same way. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Schoenberg, Violin Concerto Op. 36 - Hilary Hahn, violin * Webern, “Sechs Bagatellen” Op. 9 * Berg, “Verwandlungsmusik” from “Lulu”, Act 1 * Boulez, “Le Marteau sans maitre” Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.

House of the Rising Sun Before Bob Dylan And After The Animals: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.2

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Host Nate Wilcox and Ted Anthony, author of “Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song”, work through what a “version” even is when a song has thousands of them: the keyboard solo, the famous opening riff, who heard what from whom, and Anthony’s conclusion that we are never going to sort it out and that this is fine. Songs like this one came out of nowhere, moved around in the shadows, surfaced when they got popular, and went back into the shadows to mutate again. We’re re-presenting this episode which originally dropped in 2019, as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning…to the End series which puts all the episodes in chronological order by subject. In 1937 Alan Lomax pointed a recording machine at a teenager in Middlesboro, Kentucky named Georgia Turner and captured “The House of the Rising Sun.” He printed it in “Our Singing Country” in 1941, and Ted Anthony’s description of what Lomax was in that moment is the best line in the episode: a vector for the virus. The book that carried it went straight into the hands of Lead Belly, Josh White, Woody Guthrie and the Weavers - the men and women who were, in that moment, inventing the idea of American folk music. Josh White took it into the minor key, or Dave Van Ronk did, and even Anthony cannot fully settle which. Dylan took it from Van Ronk and put it on his first album, which Van Ronk regarded as not cricket. And in Newcastle upon Tyne a young man called Eric Burdon found that album in a record shop, recognized a song he already half-knew, and two years later the Animals made the version the whole world knows. Anthony calls that the biggest inflection point in the song’s life, and it is also where the story turns ugly. The Animals were told to credit a single name for arranging the song on the 45 and sort the details out later. The name chosen was Alan Price. The royalties and the recriminations followed from that one decision, and they were still following decades later - Burdon told Anthony his version of it, their drummer John Steele told a different one, and Price never returned Anthony’s calls in all the years he tried. What makes the book more than a detective story is what Anthony went looking for next. He tracked down whether Georgia Turner - who grew up, had a family, and never had any part in what the song became - ever saw a penny of it. She did, a little, around the time of the Animals’ record. He calls finding that out the most moving experience of writing the book, and he did not expect it. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “House of the Rising Sun” Georgia Turner, recorded by Alan Lomax, 1937 * “House of the Rising Sun” Josh White * “Amazing Grace” The Blind Boys of Alabama - not a version of the song at all, but sung to its melody * Snake Farm, “Rising Sun” - a 21st-century take that came out after the book was written

The Velvet Underground Brought the Avant-Garde to Rock and Presaged Punk

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com The Velvet Underground are the standard example of a band whose importance has nothing to do with how many records they sold. What gets lost in the retelling is how strange the arrangement actually was: a Long Island pop songwriter who had been grinding out knock-offs for a budget label, a Welsh viola player out of La Monte Young’s drone ensemble, and a pop artist who wanted a band the way he wanted a film camera. Victor Bockris - co-author, with Gerard Malanga, of “Uptight: The Velvet Underground Story” - joins Nate to go through it. They get into what John Cale actually contributed, which was not decoration but the thing that made an ordinary band extraordinary - sustained tone, drone, and the beat repetition that gave the psychedelic material a rigor nobody else’s had. They get into Lou Reed writing lyrics as literature rather than as a vehicle for a melody, and what that did to rock and roll. They get into Angus MacLise walking out because the band agreed to start and stop at fixed times, which he regarded as a line he could not cross. Then the Warhol years: the Delmonico Hotel gig, an extremely unusual booking for a rock band; the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which Bockris puts ten to eighteen months ahead of anything else happening; Nico, and the oil-and-water quality that made the first album what it is; the worry inside the camp that Lou Reed did not have the charisma to front a band. And Tom Wilson, the A&R man who was starting Verve at MGM and signed them - the same man who had just signed and produced Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. And then the long unravelling: Cale out, Doug Yule in and doing what he was told, the third album, the management fight with Warhol and Paul Morrissey over publishing, a record sleeve that is a photograph of Doug Yule alone in the studio, and Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker pushed steadily into the background - before the whole thing turns up again, a decade later, as the blueprint for punk. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “I’m Waiting for the Man” - The Velvet Underground & Nico, 1967 * “Sister Ray” - White Light/White Heat, 1968 * “What Goes On” - The Velvet Underground, 1969 (the third album, after Cale and Nico had gone) * “Sweet Jane” - Loaded, 1970

The Band That Broke Czechoslovakian Communism: Plastic People of the Universe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Joe Yanosik, author of “A Consumer Guide to the Plastic People of the Universe,” joins host Nate Wilcox to tell the whole story: the tapes smuggled out of the country in the mid-seventies, the album pressed in Ireland and released in London by two expatriates without the band’s knowledge, the copy that made it to a New Orleans record shop where Yanosik finally found it after years of looking, the gatefold booklet that told him the whole history while the record played. Vratislav Brabenec, the saxophonist, driven into exile in Canada. And in 1997, President Havel more or less ordering the band to reunite and play for his cabinet. Yanosik’s book is a guide to the music as much as the myth, which is the point - most people who know the Plastic People know the arrests and one album, and there is far more to hear. You always hear about revolutionary bands. This is a band that actually caused a revolution. A seventeen-year-old named Milan Hlavsa heard a smuggled copy of “The Velvet Underground and Nico” - “I’m Waiting for the Man” in particular- that hammering rhythm - and thought: this is simple enough that I could do it. He started a band a few weeks after Warsaw Pact tanks came into Prague in August of 1968, and named it after a Frank Zappa song. From the other side of the Iron Curtain, the distinction between those two records was invisible. What they had in common - somebody doing exactly what he wanted, in public, at volume - was the only part that mattered when the alternative was a state-licensed band playing state-approved songs. The Plastic People lost their licence. They played weddings, because a wedding was a private event the state could not easily stop, and their friends got married two and three times so there would be somewhere to play. Their artistic director, Ivan Jirous - a man who wanted to be their Andy Warhol - staged festivals disguised as wedding celebrations. In 1976 the band was arrested and tried, and that trial is what produced Charter 77, the human rights manifesto that turned Vaclav Havel from a banned playwright into a dissident leader. Thirteen years later he was president. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “Prší, prší” (”It’s Raining, It’s Raining”), 1974 * “Metastáza” (”Metastasis”), 1984 * “Mladé dívky” (”Young Girls”), 1985 * “Z rohu do rohu” (”From Corner to Corner”), 1985, from the “Půlnoční myš” (Midnight Mouse) album

Yoko Ono Brought Classical and Avant-Garde Techniques to Rock

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Yoko Ono does not get a fair shot. She is one of the most famous people alive and one whose name-ID-to-listener ratio is possibly the worst of any massive celebrity and most of what is believed about her is either wrong or beside the point. Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Madeline Bocaro author of “In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono.” The book is not a straight biography. It runs 558 pages of individual stories about the work - the artworks, the songs, the albums, one at a time - written over years for other fans and friends. It is an appreciation by someone who has actually done the listening. Nate and Bocaro start where the story actually starts, which is not 1966 and not the Beatles. Yoko was born to wealth and privilege in Tokyo, Japan. She received extensive musical training in both Western classical and Japanese traditions. Her first husband was Japan’s leading avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. She first emerged in her own right after moving to New York where she dived into the avant-garde scene as a conceptual artist and musician: her loft at 112 Chambers Street hosted the concert series that helped establish La Monte Young, and she was working in the circle around John Cage and Fluxus while the Beatles were still in Hamburg. Her sense that a work is not finished until someone else completes it - that the audience is the other half - is the premise under all of it. Nate and Madeline get to the singing, which is the thing people think they are objecting to and mostly have not heard in context: the Japanese folk forms behind it, the enka tradition, a voice used as an instrument rather than a delivery system for words. They get to Ornette Coleman. They get to the marriage, the myth-making, the Peter Brown book, and what the record actually shows about whether she broke up the Beatles - including Bocaro’s account of Paul McCartney, in her telling, being “really nice” about it and effectively saying: go be with her. And they get to “Walking on Thin Ice,” which John Lennon was carrying home from the studio the night he was killed, and which is one of the best records either of them ever made. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE “ * Sakura” - a traditional Japanese folk song, sung by Yoko on The Mike Douglas Show * “Don’t Worry Kyoko” - Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band, featuring Eric Clapton * “Mrs. Lennon” - from the “Fly” album, 1971 whose melody might be familiar to Big Star fans from “Holocaust”, but Yoko wrote it and got songwriter’s credit for the Big Star song. * “Walking on Thin Ice” - 1981 The free cut runs 42:07 and stops just before Bocaro answers the question everyone asks - whether Yoko broke up the Beatles. That answer, “Walking on Thin Ice,” and the last quarter of the conversation are behind the paywall. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.

From Louis Armstrong to the White Stripes, 'St James Infirmary' Connects Folk Traditions to Jazz and Rock: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 3.1

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Season 3 of Let It Roll: From the Beginning… opens with host Nate Wilcox talking to Robert W. Harwood about “I Went Down to St. James Infirmary” - a book about one song and about how confidently the history of a song can be wrong. Almost everything widely believed about “St. James Infirmary” turns out to be untrue. It is not a variant of “The Unfortunate Rake,” the British broadside that gives us “Streets of Laredo” and “The Dying Cowboy.” That connection was made by A.L. Lloyd - a figure Nate describes as something like the Carl Sandburg and the Pete Seeger of British folk music rolled together - in a single transitional sentence in a five-page article, with no evidence offered for it at all. Lloyd barely cared about the song; it appears twice in his writings, once for a single sentence. But he was influential enough that the assumption held for decades. Harwood’s image for it is a pig rolling over a piglet in a tight stall. Blind Willie McTell did not write “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” as a tribute to it either. He told Ed Rhodes a long and convincing story about having written it for a friend, and most people still believe him, but the song had been recorded twenty years earlier by Martha Copeland and copyrighted by Porter Grainger. Grainger is one of the recoveries of the book: a songwriter for Bessie Smith who played in her orchestra, arranged for revues, and vanished so completely that nobody had established even his birth year before Harwood went looking - not because it was hard to find, but because no one had been interested enough to look. His death date is still unknown. From there the trail runs through Carl Moore and Phil Baxter and the two Texas towns that each claim the song, then to Don Redman - university-trained, the arranger who made Fletcher Henderson’s band what it was - who is the vector that carries the song to Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives. And then to Irving Mills, who copyrighted it under the name Joe Primrose, a southern nom de plume who never wrote another song in his life and appears nowhere else in the copyright registers. When the copyright came up for renewal in the 1960s and the controversy had died down, Mills quietly put his own name on it. He had also written a modified version years earlier - opening with “Why Am I Always Moaning?” - purely to secure a second copyright on the same song. Nate and Harwood close on where all this lands now: the blurred lines verdict, attempts to copyright timbre, and hip-hop records with thirty names on the credits. As Nate points out, if everyone with a claim to “St. James Infirmary” had lawyered up in the 1920s, that is roughly the number you would have had. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Louis Armstrong, “St. James Infirmary Blues” (1928) * Jimmie Rodgers, “Those Gambler’s Blues” * Bobby “Blue” Bland, “St. James Infirmary” * The White Stripes, “St. James Infirmary Blues” This episode originally dropped in 2022. We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. 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. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.

Pop Had An Entirely Different Meaning Before 1955: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 2.12

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Bob Stanley to discuss “Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music, A History” - the prequel to his own earlier book, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé”. That one started at 1955 and ran forward through the rock and roll era. This one goes back and asks what the word “pop” meant before rock and roll…

Hardcore Punk Ignored Corporate America

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Most of the other musical movements we’ve covered at Let It Roll were all too eager to cut deals with corporate America to reach a mass audience. Today’s topic is the one subgenre that loudly and proudly proclaimed it wanted nothing to do with corporate America or even mainstream American culture. Between 1980 and 1986, hardcore punk bands built their own labels, their own venues, their own fanzines, and their own touring circuit, entirely outside a music business that wanted nothing to do with it. Steven Blush - author of “American Hardcore: A Tribal History” and maker of the 2006 documentary of the same name - joins host Nate Wilcox to discuss the scene he grew up inside: Black Flag and the Bad Brains, D.C. and L.A. and Texas, the violence, the straight edge, the fury, and what happens to a subculture that gets absorbed by the mainstream twenty years after it stopped caring. The 25th anniversary edition of the book is set to be released in March, 2027. Buy the book and support the show. This interview originally aired in 2020. Let It Roll is a podcast about how and why popular music happens. 500+ episodes and 500+ hours in the archive. Songs played in this episode: * “Out of Vogue” Middle ClassNate: “considered by many to be one of the two first hardcore punk singles.” Orange County. * “Louie Louie” Black Flag. Nate: “a classic case of taking rock history and throwing it in people’s faces. This really pissed people off at the time.” * “Cashing In” Minor ThreatBlush on Ian MacKaye’s “tongue in cheek and ironic references to selling out” - recorded while the rest of the band was learning U2 songs. * “Sacred Love” Bad BrainsRon St. Germain producer: the vocal was recorded down a phone line with H.R. in jail. Blush: “I remember that just blowing a hole through our high school.” Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.

The Weavers: Folk Music vs the Blacklist

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com In 1950 the Weavers were the biggest vocal group in the country. “Goodnight, Irene” sat at number one for thirteen weeks. They were also unabashedly left-wing, and within three years they could not get a booking anywhere in America. Jesse Jarnow - author of “Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America” - joins host Nate Wilcox to tell the story of one of America’s unlikeliest million-selling pop combos, and their collision with the paranoid American right. Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman took the songs Alan Lomax had been collecting and put them on the pop charts. Then the lists came out. Songs in this episode * “Goodnight, Irene” Nate: “one of two songs that broke the Weavers through to a pop audience.” * “Wimoweh” From South Africa; became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” * “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” Woody Guthrie, in the Weavers’ rewritten version. Nate: “I hate that version.” * “Wasn’t That a Time” The song they were investigated for, and the book’s title. This episode originally dropped in 2019. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.

The Kinks' Class-Consciousness Made Them Wary of the Promises of Swinging London

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Swinging London was sold as the moment the English class system finally cracked. The Kinks came out of Muswell Hill and never believed a word of it. Mark Doyle - author of “The Kinks: Songs of the Semi-Detached” - joins host Nate Wilcox to discuss the band’s relationship to British culture, to African American music, and above all to class: the one subject English pop was supposed to have moved past, and the one Ray Davies kept writing about anyway. This episode originally dropped in 2021. Songs in this episode * “I Need You” Check out Dave Davies’ use of feedback in the intro. The third and final song to use the arrangement strategy of “You Really Got Me”. * “A Well Respected Man”Ray Davies first social commentary song. * “The Village Green Preservation Society” Ray’s ode to the traditional English ways of life could not have been more out of steop with the rock scene in 1968, but the namesake album became regarded as their best. * “The Money-Go-Round” From the album that put the Kinks back on the map in America: “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround.” The most biting satire ever written of the business end of the pop process. Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.

Irving Berlin Defined American Music: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 2.11

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Host Nate Wilcox welcomes James Kaplan to discuss his book “Irving Berlin: New York Genius” — a life that runs from a Lower East Side childhood to a fifty-year career at the centre of American popular song, and then to almost thirty years of silence. Jerome Kern’s line is the one everybody quotes, and it holds up: Berlin has no place in American music, he is American music. Kaplan and Nate draw the comparison to Lennon and McCartney — the same work ethic, the same instinct for how a song is built — and then note the difference, which is that Berlin’s run did not stop after ten years. He was having hits in 1911 and still writing in the 1960s. The episode starts before “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and that is deliberate. Berlin came up writing “ethnic songs,” the era’s fad for numbers voiced as German, Italian, Jewish or African American characters, mocking and celebrating in the same breath. His own “Oh! How That German Could Love” is one of them, and what Kaplan hears in it is a young writer already having his way with a form rather than serving it. From there: the ragtime controversy and what “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” actually did; the 1933 revue “As Thousands Cheer,” where a comic sketch ended and the curtain came down carrying a newspaper headline about a lynching, straight into Ethel Waters singing “Supper Time”; the real blowback against “God Bless America” when it was introduced; the war years, the South Pacific tours at genuine risk, and the depression and hospitalisation that followed; and the long reclusive coda, including the hundredth birthday celebration he did not attend. The losses run underneath all of it. Berlin wrote “When I Lost You” for his first wife, who died shortly after their honeymoon. His second marriage, to Ellin Mackay, was newspaper catnip; he lost a fortune in the crash and signed the royalties of “Always” over to her. James Kaplan came back to Let It Roll twice more, for his two volumes on Frank Sinatra — so this is the first of three. “Irving Berlin: New York Genius” is published by Yale University Press. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Irving Berlin, “Oh! How That German Could Love” - Berlin himself, singing his own 1910 song * Bing Crosby and Al Jolson, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” * Fred Astaire, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” - the 1946 version, from the film “Blue Skies” * Frank Sinatra, “When I Lost You” - from All Alone (1962) There’s one more thing worth noticing about that record. When Berlin wrote “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in 1929 it was about Black Harlem — the well-to-do strolling “up on Lenox Avenue,” the “high browns from down the levee,” Lulu Belle spending her last two bits. For the 1946 film he rewrote it. Lenox Avenue became Park Avenue and the rest of that world went with it. Same tune, and the song’s subject quietly turns white. Astaire is singing the second version. The free cut ends at 35:18, just after the Astaire. Free listeners get three of the four records; the Sinatra and the whole last third are behind the paywall. This episode originally dropped in 2020. We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. 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.

Pioneering Gospel Composers: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 2.10

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Host Nate Wilcox was joined again by Garrett Cash for the second episode of the Holy Roll series which we’re recasting as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning… series, this time on the two people who essentially invented gospel composition as a published, professional craft — Charles Albert Tindley and Lucie E. Campbell. Tindley was writing and publishing in Philadelphia before there was a gospel industry to publish into. He was the first African American to bring out an original song collection of his own, and the songs travelled far past the church: Elvis Presley recorded his “Stand By Me” — not the Ben E. King song, which came later and was influenced by it — and Washington Phillips cut “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There.” Lucie Campbell wrote for the National Baptist Convention and shaped what a generation of singers sang. Garrett and Nate get into her suspicion of blues and popular music as corrupting, and the young singers she found and pushed forward anyway. Along the way: the holiness and Pentecostal movements and the Azusa Street revival, the Jubilee style that came out of Fisk and what it was trying to smooth away, lining out and why it survives in worship music now, and how these songs reached Ernest Tubb, the Carter Family, Wilson Pickett and Mahalia Jackson. The book under discussion is “We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers,” edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Washington Phillips, “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave Them There” - written by Charles Tindley * Elvis Presley, “Stand By Me” - written by Charles Tindley * Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, “End of My Journey (He’ll Understand, He’ll Say Well Done)” - written by Lucie Campbell * Marion Williams and the Stars of Faith, “In the Upper Room” - written by Lucie Campbell This episode originally dropped in 2022. We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter and calling it Let It Roll: From the Beginning….to the End. 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.

Ted Gioia on The Birth of Jazz in New Orleans: Let It Roll From the Beginning...2.9

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com Ted Gioia returns to discuss “The History of Jazz,” and host Nate Wilcox takes him all the way back to the start of the book, to the prehistory of the music. There is general agreement that jazz came out of New Orleans; there was a period when people disputed it, and a time when the Soviet Union claimed it started in Siberia. Ted explains why that city, why that moment - and what we can and cannot know about who played it first. Also: Jelly Roll Morton, reclaimed as a serious figure in American music rather than a bragging pimp with a revolver and a flashy wardrobe. And James Reese Europe — a major figure who probably should not be reduced to the jazz tradition at all, because so much of what he did sits outside and beyond it. And Ted’s argument about what the music actually is: that jazz is the art of living in the moment, that spontaneity is its whole essence, and that this is inseparable from what it has cost the people who played it. Which brings the episode to Louis Armstrong — the greatest living improviser of his era, the culmination of New Orleans jazz and the end point of it, because he laid the framework for everything that came after. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * Basile Barès, “Los Campanillas” — a 19th century New Orleans composer, born enslaved. This particular piece went unpublished, so almost nobody heard it in his lifetime. The Habanera rhythm of Cuba is already there in it, in the city’s music, before jazz. * Charley Patton, “Pony Blues” * James Reese Europe playing W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” * Jelly Roll Morton playing Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress This episode originally dropped in 2021. We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. The Let It Roll From the Beginning… series is a relaunch of Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter for the first time.

The First Recording Stars: Enrico Caruso, Bert Williams and Al Jolson: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 2.8

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes an 1890s recording by George Washington Johnson, presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the billing given to the performer and in the discussion around it. In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox continue their discussion of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music,” the second of two episodes on the book. This one is about the first people the recording business ever made famous, and the wildly different deals it offered them. George Washington Johnson had no way to copy a wax cylinder, so every single one sold had to be recorded again — he sang the same laugh an estimated forty thousand times. Ten years later Enrico Caruso sang once into a gramophone and the factory made the copies. Same business, different decades, completely different deals, and that is the story of the evolution of the American music business. Also: radio’s sudden arrival in the 1920s and what it did to record sales, Bert Williams, Irving Berlin, and Al Jolson — the biggest entertainer in America in his day, and why almost nobody has heard him since. With music: Caruso’s “The Lost Chord,” Bert Williams’ “Nobody” and “He’s a Cousin of Mine,” George Washington Johnson’s “Laughing Song” from the 1890s, and Jolson’s “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” cut for Brunswick in 1926. This episode originally dropped in 2018. Listen to the full Let It Roll archive — 500+ episodes and 500+ hours — at letitrollpodcast.substack.com