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. letitrollpodcast.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    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.

    Robert Johnson Revised: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.11

  2. 4d ago

    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.

    Robert Johnson: Escaping the Delta: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.10

  3. 6d ago

    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.

    Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-War Blues of St. Louis: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.9

  4. Oct 23

    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.

    Chick Webb's Big Beat Style of Swing Led Directly to Rock 'n' Roll: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.8

  5. Oct 21

    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.

    Swing King Chick Webb Brought Ella Fitzgerald to the World: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.7

  6. Oct 19

    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.

    Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Big Joe Turner: How Kansas City Vice Birthed Kansas City Jazz: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.6

  7. Oct 16

    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.

    Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Josh White & Jean Ritchie and the first Folk Revival: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.5

  8. Oct 14

    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.

    Rhythm & Blues from Bessie Smith to Louis Jordan: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.4
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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Nate Wilcox
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    236
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Nathan Wilcox
  • Show Website
    Let It Roll EXTRA

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