Groundwater: The Blues Beneath American Music

The blues isn’t a genre. It’s the groundwater — the current running under country, rock, jazz, and hip-hop, from Congo Square to the South Bronx. Groundwater is a podcast about American popular music, and the boundaries the recording industry invented in 1927 to keep the same music sold to two audiences.

The show argues three things. First, that the blues-country split we inherited was manufactured by record labels at the Bristol Sessions — Ralph Peer building two shelves out of the same music. Second, that the blues runs beneath all of American popular music, surfacing in country, rock, jazz, and hip-hop. Third, that when the music got political, the state did not ban the songs. It went after the singers — through drug charges, tax investigations, and loyalty tests, from Billie Holiday through the Dixie Chicks.

The show is hosted by Thomas Stubbs and adapted from his forthcoming book Race Records: The Lie That Split American Music — and the Blues That Ran Underneath. The first three episodes work through Chapter 1, The Mouth of the River, tracing the music from Congo Square through Storyville and Louis Armstrong to the second-line beat that runs through New Orleans today.

It’s made for readers of Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, Kelefa Sanneh’s Major Labels, and Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop — and for anyone who wants pop music taken as seriously as those books take it.

New episodes posted regularly. Listen anywhere you get podcasts.