All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 in total
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 change...
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 speci...
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 ...
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 know...
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 t...
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 ...
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 A...
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, ...
