Let It Roll EXTRA

Gary Giddins agreed to write a 300-page Bing Crosby book in three years so he could get back to Duke Ellington. That was more than twenty-five years ago. He started out half-believing the hatchet jobs and found instead a man the people he interviewed kept calling the nicest, kindest and most generous they ever worked with, a Republican who was ahead of …

In 1917 a white New Orleans band that was not the original anything and could not spell its own genre put out a record that sounded, in Peter Doggett’s words, like “a gang of crazed instrumentalists fighting for supremacy.” Within ten years the microphone had made it possible to sing in a whisper, radio had put that whisper in millions of private rooms, and the loudest music in America had become the most intimate.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Peter Doggett, author of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop Music,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 and returning now to conclude season 3 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.

It starts with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who got to record first because the Black New Orleans bands they copied turned the chance down rather than give their secrets away, and whose “Livery Stable Blues” hit Britain the way the Sex Pistols would sixty years later. Then the taming: Paul Whiteman, Ferde Grofe’s arrangements and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which Gershwin nearly forgot to write and which the critics of both camps thought was a perversion of the music they loved.

Then the machine that changed singing. Electrical recording let a vocalist lean in to the microphone instead of shouting over the band, and the crooner was born - Rudy Vallee, who had needed a megaphone to be heard, and Bing Crosby, who Artie Shaw called “the first hip white person born in the United States.” Peter, who grew up thinking Crosby was the squarest man alive, explains why he changed his mind. Also: why the ukulele was everywhere in the 1920s, the Prince of Wales sitting in on drums with London jazz bands, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s refusal to sound like American radio, and George Formby’s banned and filthy ukulele songs - which George Harrison loved to the end of his life.

After the paywall: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and the Depression, which wiped out the record business and left radio standing; the coming of sound to the movies and what The Jazz Singer looks like now; the only film footage of Bessie Smith and Jimmie Rodgers, and why it exists at all; and a seven-year-old Sammy Davis Jr. in “Rufus Jones for President.”

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

* “Livery Stable Blues,” Original Dixieland Jazz Band

* “Rhapsody in Blue,” Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra - a George

Gershwin composition

* “With My Little Ukulele in My Hand,” George Formby

* “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” Bing Crosby

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.

The same man wrote “It’s Tight Like That” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” As Georgia Tom, Thomas A. Dorsey cut it with Tampa Red in 1928 - one of the dirtiest hits of the decade, and the record that set off the hokum craze. As Thomas A. Dorsey, he wrote the song Mahalia Jackson sang at Martin Luther King’s funeral. And the order is not the one you would guess: “It’s Tight Like That” came after his religious conversion, not before it, because the church songs were not paying and he had a wife to feed.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Garrett Cash for the fourth installment of HolyRoll, their history of gospel music, in a conversation first recorded 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 - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.

The book under discussion is Michael W. Harris’s “The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church,” with Anthony Heilbut’s “The Gospel Sound” and Robert Darden’s “People Get Ready!” alongside it.

Garrett found Dorsey by accident, on a Georgia historical marker in Villa Rica, where he stopped expecting a Civil War battle and wondered for a moment whether the big band leader Tommy Dorsey had been born down the road.

Nate’s own discovery was stranger: that music which seems as old as the church itself has a starting point, and that it came as late as the early 1930s. Dorsey was a preacher’s son and a church organist’s son who moved to Atlanta, learned soft piano in houses where couples danced quietly, and then went north in the Great Migration and watched Chicago fill up with the up-tempo New Orleans jazz of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, which left his own style hopelessly out of date. He worked his way back up as Ma Rainey’s bandleader, collapsed into a depression that stopped him performing for something like eighteen months, and came out of it by way of a preacher who, the story goes, pulled a snake out of his mouth.

What followed is the story Harris tells: the Black churches of the North had spent two generations stamping out the call and response and the shouting of the old brush arbor meetings in favour of anthems and classical choral music, and the migrants filling their pews wanted it back. Dorsey gave it to them, got thrown out of the best churches in the country for it, and inside a few years had taken them over. Then his wife Nettie died in childbirth while he was away singing in St. Louis, and their baby son died the next day. A friend sat him at a piano to take his mind off it, and out of an old hymn tune he made “Precious Lord.”

Also: Willie Mae Ford Smith and the National Baptist Convention of 1930; Theodore Frye, the strutting preacher who became his first partner; Sallie Martin, who fixed his business; why Dorsey was selling sheet music rather than records through the Depression; and the documentary “Say Amen, Somebody,” which Nate recommends without reservation.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

* “It’s Tight Like That”, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom,

* “Rock Me” Sister Rosetta Tharpe with Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra,

* “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)” Elvis Presley

* “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” Mahalia Jackson

This episode originally dropped in 2022.

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.

Before OKeh would bet on records made by Black artists for Black buyers, somebody had to go and find out whether that market existed. The company sent Ralph Peer. He went into barbershops and pool halls and asked people whether they would buy records made by their own artists, and came back with the answer: yes, they will. That is Barry Mazor’s account of how Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” got made in 1920 - not the story Perry Bradford told for the rest of his life, and Barry has a line for that: the least-heard sentence in the history of music is “I don’t deserve that much credit for this.”

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by Barry Mazor, author of “Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music,” in a conversation first recorded 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 - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.

Bristol, Barry points out, is two weeks in a fifty-year career. Peer was not a folklorist and never pretended to be one; the Lomaxes carried a recorder in the trunk of a car, while Peer hauled equipment Barry compares to a mainframe computer, and he went looking for novelty rather than for survivals. He was the son of a sewing-machine salesman in Independence, Missouri, who started stocking Columbia talking machines, and by the age of ten Ralph was riding the trolley down to the Columbia warehouse in Kansas City to fetch records for the store. He stayed in the business for the rest of his life.

Nate runs through the list of what Peer recorded at OKeh and then at Victor, and it is hard to believe it is one man’s work: Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Sylvester Weaver’s “Guitar Rag,” Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, the Memphis Jug Band, Blind Willie McTell, one of the first Cajun records ever made, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and then the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. He put Rodgers in the studio with Louis Armstrong. He put Fats Waller in front of Eddie Condon, Jack Teagarden and Gene Krupa. And Barry makes the case that none of it rested on Peer’s own taste - he once said it was almost important not to know too much about the music, because you could get caught up in it.

What it rested on was the song. Barry explains why the record business ignored roots music for thirty years - the money was in sheet music, sheet music needed buyers who could read notes, and the big labels sold records the way Britannica sold encyclopedias, as self-improvement - and why Peer saw that the real money was in the publishing. Sara Carter did not want to sing “Single Girl, Married Girl.” Peer picked it on a day A.P. had wandered off, and she laughed about it for years afterward: whatever song she didn’t like but he told her to do turned out to be their biggest seller.

Also: the “Wreck of the Old 97” lawsuit, and the misheard word in Vernon Dalhart’s record that proved who copied whom; the Depression, when Jimmie Rodgers went from 500,000 copies to 5,000 and Peer wrote to tell him he was still top of the heap, but the heap was a lot shorter; and how Peer walked away from Victor owning his own publishing company.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

* “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” Sara Martin, with Fats Waller on piano

* “Single Girl, Married Girl” The Carter Family

* “Cocaine Habit Blues” The Memphis Jug Band

* “Besame Mucho” Jimmy Dorsey and His Orchestra, with Bob Eberly and Kitty Kallen

This episode originally dropped in 2022.

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.

Ralph Peer went to Victor with an offer no record man has made before or since: pay me a dollar a year, and let me keep the publishing. Victor took it. It looks like modesty and it was the opposite - publishing was where the money had always been, and Peer had worked out that the way to get rich in the record business was to own the songs rather than the sides. That is the deal underneath the Bristol sessions of 1927, and it is why Peer went looking for performers who wrote their own material instead of fiddlers playing tunes everybody already owned. The reason American law protects songwriters so fiercely in the first place traces back to Stephen Foster dying a pauper at thirty-eight - the foundational trauma of the American music business, and the thing every statute since has been bending over backwards to prevent happening again.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by James Porter - Chicago writer, DJ and musician - to open CountryRoll, their run through Ken Burns’s “

series, in a conversation first recorded in 2021 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 - the story of the music told forward, in the order it actually happened.

Burns’s lodestar here is Bill C. Malone, whose “Country Music U.S.A.” is the book the whole field still argues with, and the series takes his line: country is working-class music, a mix of labour songs, parlour ballads, fiddle tunes, Sunday hymns both Black and white, saloon music, barrio music and cowboy songs. James’s verdict is warmer than he expected to give. A lot of people went in braced for the worst, having found the jazz series skimmed a deep well - and there is always going to be somebody hollering that Burns forgot the one guy who had a hit on a truck-stop jukebox in 1962. But the case James makes is that the series is generous exactly where it matters most, on the Black musicians who were there from the start.

DeFord Bailey is the proof. The harmonica player was the most featured artist in the early history of the Grand Ole Opry, and audiences who tuned in out of curiosity came away startled by how much airtime the series gives him. The harder point sits underneath it: the musical miscegenation was real and the social equality was not. James is a devoted collector of old-time string band reissues and puts it plainly - you will be grooving along to a banjo riff and a guitar riff and then, out of nowhere, the lyric turns, and if you keep listening it gets worse. Both things are true at once, and the episode does not let either off the hook.

The two acts Burns builds the hour on are the obvious ones and, James argues, the right ones. The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers between them cover the whole industry: Peer, the portable recording rig, the publishing, the songs. Nate reaches for the Beatles-and-Stones comparison and James takes it, with the caveat that nobody knows what John Lennon would make of being the Carter Family in that equation.

What separates them is temperament. Rodgers was showbiz before he was famous - the man in the railroad cap and dirty denim was competing directly with Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo, which is not what the photographs lead you to expect. The Carter Family were the opposite, the first superstars entirely unspoiled by celebrity, reaching millions a week off border radio and never once becoming show people.

And then the omissions, which is where James gets exercised and where this episode earns its place in the run. Burns mentions Charlie Poole. He does not mention Gid Tanner, or the Skillet Lickers, or Riley Puckett - one of James’s favourites from the era and, he says, about the most gifted of them. Nor Vernon Dalhart, who was competing with the crooners and selling pop units, the Eddy Arnold of his day, with “The Prisoner’s Song.” The thread tying those names together is the one the series is least comfortable with: a great deal of what these people sang was not folk music at all. Track the repertoire and you find show tunes from the 1880s and 1890s - country, once again, being pop.

Also: the acetates that went straight to the radio before anybody thought to press them; what the labels meant by their “race” series and their “hillbilly” series, and who decided which was which; Eck Robertson’s 1922 fiddle sides that did not sell and Fiddlin’ John Carson’s 1923 Atlanta record that did; Peer discovering Louis Armstrong later on; Ernest Stoneman’s royalty check as the thing that brought the rush to Bristol; and the Scots-Irish inheritance running under all of it.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

* Fiddlin’ John Carson, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”

* DeFord Bailey, “Fox Chase”

* Jimmie Rodgers with Louis Armstrong, “Blue Yodel No. 9”

* Riley Puckett, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie”

This episode originally dropped in 2021.

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.

Ralph Peer was not an employee of anybody. He was an independent contractor working exclusively for RCA Victor, and he had set up a publishing company - which meant he had a reason to look for performers who wrote their own material, and a reason to pass some of that money back to them. So in the summer of 1927 he printed leaflets, took out advertisements in the Bristol newspaper asking for old-time musicians, and set up a portable recording lathe in an old hat factory on State Street, a road with a state line running down the middle of it, Tennessee on one side and Virginia on the other. What brought the rush on was a local reporter sitting in on a Stoneman family session and noting that Pop Stoneman had made about $2,500 in royalties that year - an unimaginable sum then, and especially for hillbillies. Inside a fortnight Peer had recorded both the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined by Ed Ward, his original co-host and the author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” for a conversation first recorded 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.

Ed’s argument is a legal and commercial one rather than a musical one, and it is the spine of the episode: there had been country records before Bristol - Eck Robertson’s fiddle sides in 1922, Fiddlin’ John Carson out of Atlanta, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, Vernon Dalhart’s pop hits - but that music was largely traditional, and you could not copyright what everybody already played. What Peer found in Bristol was two songwriting and performing machines whose material could be arranged, credited and owned.

“Not the birth of country music so much as the birth of the country music industry,” as Ed puts it, “which I think is a real distinction that has to be made.”

Both acts got there on other people’s songs. A.P. Carter roamed the hills collecting material with Lesley Riddle, a Black musician who had a legitimate claim on co-writing credits that nobody in 1928 was sophisticated enough to give him - Riddle knew the Black churches where the sacred material was, and the sheet music aimed at middle-class Black and Black vaudeville audiences.

Jimmie Rodgers had his sister-in-law Elsie McWilliams writing for him. And Maybelle Carter’s famously distinctive guitar style, Ed says flatly, is probably the only traditional thing about the way the Carter Family performed: it is church style, the way you lead a congregation that cannot read music or even shape notes - line the melody out on the bass strings, play it through once, and the congregation sings the words.

The two acts diverge from there. The Carters were a self-contained group - Peer asked A.P. if he had some new songs, the lineup was set, and as Nate puts it, it was much more like the Beatles. Rodgers was the opposite: Peer, in Nate’s phrase, was constantly messing with the formula, lining up new bands and bringing in session musicians. One of them, almost at random, was a Hawaiian steel guitarist, which is how the steel guitar entered country music.

Another was Louis Armstrong. Rodgers, as Ed and Nate put it, did not see a musical color line - he was grabbing bits of Black show business wholesale, and his yodel very likely came through Emmett Miller, the blackface vaudeville performer who cut the “Lovesick Blues” Hank Williams built his career on. Both men were around Asheville at the same time, and who got whose yodel is lost.

Rodgers had good ears and bad lungs. Tuberculosis was diagnosed in 1924, took him off the railroad, and killed him in 1933 - after years of relentless touring and recording with a stretcher set up in the studio so he could lie down between takes. He is, Nate argues, American music’s consumptive romantic, the 19th century Chopin trope landing in the 20th, and the direct ancestor of Hank Williams, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse. Somebody - possibly Peer - told him the average life of a popular performer was three years.

The Carter Family’s cross was domestic. A.P. and Sara’s marriage broke apart, and the act did not. They went to Del Rio, Texas, and broadcast from across the Mexican border on XERA, a transmitter so powerful it reached the Canadian north and carried the Carter Family to a teenage Bob Dylan in Hibbing, Minnesota. And it was on that border radio, in February 1939, that Sara dedicated a song to Coy Bayes, A.P.’s cousin, the man she had loved and given up. He was in California. He heard it, drove to the border, and she left - her family, the act, and the business - and married him.

The rest is the argument the folk revival had with itself. Harry Smith put several Carter Family sides on the Anthology of American Folk Music and no Jimmie Rodgers at all, and Ed’s explanation is deflating and probably correct: Smith wanted Moe Asch to buy his record collection, Asch’s label was called Folkways, and old tunes were therefore folk music. Almost nothing on that anthology was folk music in any strict sense - it was country and blues show business. Mike Seeger took the accident seriously, went looking, found Lesley Riddle alive and brought him onto the folk circuit. John Cohen, his bandmate in the New Lost City Ramblers, did the documenting - Ed rates him an astonishing photographer of an Appalachia the country had decided to ignore. And by the 1960s the original Carter Family were filed as folk while Mother Maybelle and her daughters, on the Grand Ole Opry every week, were filed as country - the same family, sorted by category.

Also: why both acts abandoned the fiddle that country music had run on; how the Depression turned record sales from a stream to a trickle while radio got cheaper; the case that the Carters and Rodgers kept Victor afloat; June Carter designated the comedian because she was the poorest singer, until she learned; and Mother Maybelle earning her name by saving Johnny Cash.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

* Eck Robertson, “Sallie Gooden” (Victor, 1922)

* The Carter Family, “Wildwood Flower” (Victor, 1928)

* The Carter Family, “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes”

* Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” (Victor, 1927)

This episode originally dropped in 2018.

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.

In August 1927 the Carter Family drove all day to Bristol, Virginia - Maybelle heavily pregnant, bouncing over rutted roads in a Model T that A.P. Carter had to repair two or three times on the way. At that first session they recorded “The Storms Are on the Ocean” - one of four Child ballads they would record in all, songs already three or four centuries old when they got to them. The songwriting credit on the record reads A.P. Carter.

Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock,” for the next installment 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 Carter Family and Songwriting Credit

Dave insists the book is not a history of folk music. Nate’s reply is that he is going to use it as one anyway, and Dave’s counter is the best line in the episode: that’s because you made it a history.

The credit question is where it starts. Traditional songs were fair game, because who is going to argue with you? And A.P. and Ralph Peer took the publishing between them, A.P. earning half a penny a record. Dave’s version of learning this is perfect: at fourteen he owned Physical Graffiti, heard “In My Time of Dying” credited to Led Zeppelin, then bought the first Bob Dylan album and found the same song on it, more than a decade earlier. How did Dylan record a Led Zeppelin song in 1962 and not credit them? The answer, in both cases, was royalties.

What makes the Carters worth all this is that they were not raw. Dave’s comparison: the labels realized hillbilly music was the next big thing and started holding open auditions in city after city, so imagine a record company in 1977 calling an open audition for punk bands - and in walks the Moody Blues.

Everyone else is doing anarchy in the hills of Appalachia and the Carters arrive with arrangements. Sara could stop a valley: people would walk across entire valleys if they heard she was singing on her porch on a Sunday afternoon. Maybelle was a great guitarist. And A.P.’s song-hunting partner was Lesley Riddle, a Black musician who went out collecting with him and taught Maybelle a good deal about picking.

Swinging a Child Ballad

Then the tradition goes somewhere nobody expected. In 1938 Maxine Sullivan, fresh from a hit with “Loch Lomond,” recorded a swing-jazz “Barbara Allen”; it was “Loch Lomond” she sang in the 1939 film St. Louis Blues. Dave has to correct Nate mid-conversation - “Loch Lomond” is a traditional Scottish song, not a Child ballad - and that correction is the point: most of these singers could not tell a Child ballad from any other old song, and cheerfully mixed them. “Barbara Allen” is probably the most recorded Child ballad of them all, with the possible exception of “Scarborough Fair,” and what sells Sullivan’s version is a single line: “young man, I think you’re dying,” which she delivers with everything she has.

Across the Atlantic there is Phil Tanner, a Welsh pub singer in his seventies who sang English songs, whose wife ran the pub, and who was “discovered” at a local sing-song and brought to London - where he made the car stop outside Buckingham Palace so he could sing the national anthem at it. The BBC broadcast him in 1949, the letters poured in, and when they went back to Wales to record his whole show they brought a stack of blank discs and ran out, because Phil simply kept going. He died six months later, Britain’s first folk star.

The collectors turn out to be as strange as the singers. Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp’s former assistant, came over to run a summer school at Massachusetts Agricultural College and gave herself a spare month for fieldwork - Montreal, Ontario, Nova Scotia, then a steamer to Newfoundland, armed with pen, paper and a typewriter and flatly refusing to record anybody. She came back with eight or nine local variants nobody had heard anywhere else, of “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” “The Unquiet Grave,” “Matty Groves,” “Long Lankin.” Nate’s phrase for the whole enterprise is a hall of mirrors: collectors would find a singer with a marvelous repertoire and then be disappointed to learn he had a college degree, which disqualified him as genuine folk.

John Jacob Niles was a collector before he was a singer, writing down nursery rhymes and riddles as a child, and set on his course by hearing someone sing “Lord Bateman” while he was out with a surveying party in eastern Kentucky. Then there is his voice. Dave’s first encounter with it was a Newport recording he assumed was playing at the wrong speed, and it took him three listens to decide he did not hate it. Nate is blunter - to modern ears it sounds like caterwauling until you listen closely and realize the man is singing, in a register nobody knew was available. There is also a rumor, which Nate has not heard before, that Niles developed it by singing to dolphins.

And then Burl Ives, who arrives as the safest, blandest pop-folk performer imaginable and leaves with the most complicated legacy of anyone here. He stuck with folk music when an NYU professor told him they did not want any of that around here, and he became a genuine star doing it. He also named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee - the exact opposite of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, who were persecuted for refusing. Dave’s claim is that Ives, more than anyone else in this story, encapsulates what happened to American traditional music after the war.

There is a good argument in the middle of all this about whether the Child ballads belong to America at all. Woody Guthrie barely touched them, and Dave thinks he knows why: they would not serve the work. Guthrie was an entertainer, but also an advocate, and a murder ballad was not going to help. Dave’s answer to Nate’s skepticism is the thesis of the whole series - the ballads may have been written in Europe five centuries earlier, but they lived more vital lives here, particularly in the South, than they ever did in England or Scotland. They are a foundation stone of Americana. Nate concedes the point.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

* The Carter Family, “The Storms Are on the Ocean” (Victor, 1927)

* Maxine Sullivan, “Barbara Allen” - the swing version, from the 1939

film St. Louis Blues.

* John Jacob Niles, “The Wife of Usher’s Well”

* Burl Ives, “The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife”

This episode originally dropped in 2025.

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.

Elijah Wald explains that pop music is what teenage girls like to dance to, and its history has almost all been written by men who had no dates in high school. His book is called “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll” but he might as well have called it “How Paul Whiteman Failed to Destroy Jazz.”

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Wald to make his case. The conversation first ran in 2018 and 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.

Despite the title, which Wald admits is trolling, the central figure of the story is not a Beatle. It is Paul Whiteman. Ask a white American in 1925 what jazz was, who its biggest star was, who its most daring artist was, and you would have got the same answer three times: Paul Whiteman.

He commissioned “Rhapsody in Blue” and premiered it, and Wald’s claim is that the piece did in 1924 exactly what Sergeant Pepper did in 1967 - it made middle-class listeners decide this music could be serious art.

Then comes the part that should bother you. Whiteman got filed in the same drawer as Louis Armstrong and Count Basie, so as Black music became more and more prominent, he simply sounded pale next to it.

With rock and roll we did the opposite: we took the white music that got ambitious and called it rock, and gave the Black music a different name. Which is why nobody ever has to ask whether Sergeant Pepper is better than James Brown Live at the Apollo. They were filed in different sections.

The two things Wald puts at the center of the book are technology and dancing. Live music, then records, then radio, then jukeboxes, then long-playing records, then television - and each one changes not only what is possible but people’s relationship to everything that came before. Television did not just add pictures; it killed national radio, radio went local, and local stations started competing by playing music you could not see on TV. That, he argues, is a large part of how rock and roll happened.

He starts the book in 1893 with “After the Ball” rather than fifty years earlier with Stephen Foster, and the reason is precise. Sheet music was the first means of mass production, but it was not the first technology - the piano is a technology, so is the guitar. He starts at the moment you could buy the sound itself instead of instructions for making it. Before that, music was something you did. To even play a duet, as he says, two people have to be in the room. And you could not hear anything twice, which is why music from before recording repeats itself so much: they played it, then played it again, because you were going home and would never hear it again. “Encore” did not mean another song. It meant that one, once more.

John Philip Sousa saw where this was going and hated it. His essay on what he called mechanical music has a very specific nightmare - that people would stop singing to their children and put a record on instead, that the village band everyone played in would be replaced by a machine playing strangers. Wald’s verdict is that Sousa was right and was not even paranoid enough: he could not imagine people using music to shut the world out.

From there the episode becomes a history of outsiders. Every professional musician was once a human jukebox, expected to play whatever was on the radio - Buddy Guy described how you walked into a Chicago bar, read the top ten off the jukebox and played those. Lawrence Welk having to deal with what Count Basie was doing, and Basie having to deal with Welk as well. Ragtime as the last style to sweep the country without white listeners wanting to be Black.

The shift in what white America pictured when it thought of Black America, from the countryside to the city, and how “urban” became the word. James Reese Europe leading the best band in New York because Vernon Castle insisted on a Black orchestra.

There is also a long and careful stretch on the ugliest material in American popular song, what it meant at the time, who wrote it and who bought it. Wald handles it without flinching and without excusing it.

The back half belongs to Mitch Miller, who has the best claim to having invented the record as we understand it - the idea that a record need not document a performance that could ever happen live. Take a song from here, a singer from there, musicians who have never met, a harpsichord next to a steel guitar, and put a voice on top. Miller was also the first-call oboist in New York, played on Charlie Parker with Strings, recorded with Toscanini, and was completely cynical about the pop records he made. He thought they were trash. He knew exactly how to make that kind of trash. Which brings Wald to a line worth keeping: timely and timeless are both used as compliments, and they are opposites.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE

* Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, with George Gershwin at the piano, “Rhapsody in Blue” (Victor, 1924)

* George J. Gaskin, “After the Ball” (1893)

* James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra, “Castle House Rag”

* Paul Whiteman, “From Monday On” (Victor, 1928), with Bix Beiderbecke

and a very young Bing Crosby

The 2018 conversation plays no records, so Nate cued and introduced all four for this edition.

This episode originally dropped in 2018.

Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas, and Danny Park.

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.

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.