Groundwater: the blues beneath everything

Little Louis: Louis Armstrong and the Birth of Jazz

The first jazz musician is a ghost. No recording of Buddy Bolden survives — the cylinders his band cut were thrown away as trash. 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 Louis Armstrong. He would change what music was. Groundwater is a music history podcast about American popular music — the blues, country, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and the artificial boundaries the recording industry built between them in 1927. 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 is not a genre at all but the groundwater 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. If you've read Robert Palmer's Deep Blues, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, or Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop — or if you'd like a podcast that takes pop music as seriously as those books did — this show is for you. New episodes posted regularly. Listen anywhere you get podcasts.

Below Sea Level: How New Orleans Built American Music

The Mississippi River drains thirty-one states and two Canadian provinces into a city that should not exist. 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, French colonial law, the Haitian Revolution, and an accident of empire produced the foundation of every musical tradition the United States would invent — jazz, blues, country, rock and roll, R&B, funk, hip-hop. The city is still sinking. The music is still rising. Groundwater is a music history podcast about American popular music — the blues, country, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and the artificial boundaries the recording industry built between them in 1927. 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 is not a genre at all but the groundwater 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. If you've read Robert Palmer's Deep Blues, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, or Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop — or if you'd like a podcast that takes pop music as seriously as those books did — this show is for you. New episodes posted regularly. Listen anywhere you get podcasts.