Groundwater: The Blues Beneath American Music
In 1927, the record industry split American music in two and sold it to separate audiences. We've believed the split ever since. Groundwater is a music history podcast that follows the current underneath — the blues, running from Congo Square to the South Bronx, from Robert Johnson to Aretha Franklin to hip-hop. Each episode traces a moment the industry tried to keep apart: the soul sessions at Stax and Muscle Shoals that crossed every line; Louis Armstrong working race and commerce from New Orleans to Chicago; the Great Migration carrying Muddy Waters and the Delta sound up the Illinois Central to Memphis, Ch...
We Both Speak African: Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and How Jazz Crossed the Atlantic
Dizzy Gillespie meets Chano Pozo, Django Reinhardt hears Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis records Sketches of Spain. How jazz crossed the Atlantic and came back changed.
When Jelly Roll Morton talked about the "Spanish tinge" in jazz, he wasn't talking about Spain. He was talking about Cuba, and the West African rhythmic tradition that survived the Middle Passage in Havana the same way it survived in New Orleans.
This episode traces four lines running outward from the same source: the Afro-Cuban reunion that debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and produced "Manteca"; Django Reinhardt fusing Armstrong's...
The Country's Memory: Jimi Hendrix, Strange Fruit, and American Music at 250
Jimi Hendrix played "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock in 1969 and let the war in around the melody. This year the United States turns 250. This Groundwater special steps back from the map to ask what twentieth-century American music has been for: the country's memory, the part of the record that didn't get edited.
At its center is Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" — the song that held a mirror up to lynching, and the song the state went after its singer over. Around it: the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the spirituals; Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and the ve...
The Blues Professor, Part 2: Muddy Waters, the Mardi Gras Indians, and Where to Start with the Blues
Muddy Waters, the Mardi Gras Indians, Blind Willie McTell, and the one record to start with: the second half of Thomas Stubbs's conversation with Rich Pettit, the man Atlanta knows as the Blues Professor.
In Part 1 we traced the blues out of West Africa and up the East Coast. This half starts back home in New Orleans — where Rich grew up — and the city's living traditions: the second line, the jazz funeral that walks to the cemetery on a dirge and home on a parade, and the Mardi Gras Indians, with Big Chief Jolly of the Wild Tcho...
The Blues Professor, Part 1: Piedmont Blues, the Allman Brothers, and Atlanta's Living Scene
Piedmont blues, the Allman Brothers, Lonnie Holley, and the long road the blues took out of West Africa: Thomas Stubbs sits down with Rich Pettit, the man Atlanta knows as the Blues Professor — part one of two.
For forty years, Rich has hosted Good Morning Blues on WRFG 89.3, Atlanta's community radio station. He grew up in New Orleans and came to the blues backwards — through classic rock — until he started noticing how many of those songs were covers.
Part one is about where the blues comes from and where it went: West Africa and Congo Square...
Groundwater Trailer: Why American Music's Genre Labels Are a Lie - A Music History Podcast
A two-minute introduction to Groundwater — what the show is, why American music's genre labels are a lie, and where we're going. Start here, then follow the water.
Twelfth Street Station: The Great Migration and How New Orleans Music Reached Chicago
The music didn’t ride north on riverboats. It rode the Illinois Central Railroad — out of New Orleans, up through Memphis and the Mississippi Delta into Chicago — in the luggage cars and Jim Crow coaches of the Great Migration.
Episode 4 of Groundwater traces what the music became when it left the South: Louis Armstrong stepping off the train at Twelfth Street Station in 1922 with a cornet and a fish sandwich; King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Armstrong’s first recorded solo; the Hot Five’s “West End Blues” and the thirteen-second cadenza that changed what a trumpet could do...
The Drain: New Orleans Music From Professor Longhair to Katrina
Professor Longhair kicked the bass of his piano to keep time. The Meters stripped the second line down to funk. Then the levees broke. New Orleans music from Longhair to Katrina
Armstrong left. Bechet left. Oliver left. Morton left. For thirty years, the romantic version of the story held that New Orleans jazz had migrated north and the city was living on memory. It was wrong. The city never stopped cooking.
This episode traces the music that stayed: Professor Longhair’s rumba-boogie on a piano with several keys missing; Fats Domino selling sixty-five million records wi...
Little Louis: Louis Armstrong and the Birth of Jazz
The first jazz musician is a ghost — no recording of Buddy Bolden survives. This is the story of the music from Bolden through Storyville to the kid who became Louis Armstrong. What we know about him comes from the testimony of people who heard him play, filtered through decades of memory and myth. This episode traces the music from Bolden through the legalized vice district of Storyville to a kid from the Battlefield neighborhood who walked into a pawn shop with two dollars from a Lithuanian Jewish junk dealer and walked out with a five-dollar cornet. His name was Lou...
Below Sea Level: How New Orleans Built American Music
New Orleans should not exist — a city in a swamp, below sea level, at the mouth of a continent. It became the place that built American music: jazz, blues, R&B, funk, rock and roll. New Orleans was founded in 1718 in a swamp, below sea level, by people who needed someone standing at the mouth of the continent. Within a year, the first ship carrying enslaved people arrived. A century later, a French slave code with a Sunday loophole would create the only space in slave-holding North America where West African drumming survived openly. This episode traces how geography, Fr...
