Season 3 of Let It Roll: From the Beginning… opens with host Nate Wilcox talking to Robert W. Harwood about “I Went Down to St. James Infirmary” - a book about one song and about how confidently the history of a song can be wrong.
Almost everything widely believed about “St. James Infirmary” turns out to be untrue. It is not a variant of “The Unfortunate Rake,” the British broadside that gives us “Streets of Laredo” and “The Dying Cowboy.”
Listen to the episode to find out where the song came from.
We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter and calling the series Let It Roll: From the Beginning…to the End.
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Sep 9
43 min
Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Bob Stanley to discuss “Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music, A History” - the prequel to his own earlier book, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé”.
That one started in 1955 and ran forward through the rock and roll era. This one goes back and asks what the word “pop” meant before rock and roll took the name away from it.
The answer is that it meant almost everything. Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, dance bands and crooners, the Broadway song and the novelty side, the whole commercial apparatus of a business that was already enormous before anyone thought to call it a youth market. Stanley argues that this music has been orphaned twice over - too early for the rock histories, too popular for the jazz histories - and that the gap has swallowed some of the best records ever made.
We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter and calling the series Let It Roll: From the Beginning…to the End.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
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Sep 7
36 min
Host Nate Wilcox welcomes James Kaplan to discuss his book “Irving Berlin: New York Genius” — a life that runs from a Lower East Side childhood to a fifty-year career at the centre of American popular song, and then to almost thirty years of silence.
Jerome Kern’s line is the one everybody quotes, and it holds up: Berlin has no place in American music, he is American music.
Kaplan and Nate draw the comparison to Lennon and McCartney — the same work ethic, the same instinct for how a song is built — and then note the difference, which is that Berlin’s run did not stop after ten years. He was having hits in 1911 and still writing in the 1960s.
We’re relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter, this is the second season, eleventh episode.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
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Sep 4
38 min
Host Nate Wilcox was joined again by Garrett Cash for the second episode of the Holy Roll series which we’re recasting as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning… series, this time on the two people who essentially invented gospel composition as a published, professional craft — Charles Albert Tindley and Lucie E. Campbell.
The book under discussion is “We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers,” edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon.
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
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Sep 2
44 min
We're continuing our recast of all the Let It Roll episodes in chronological order by topic with Ted Gioia on “The History of Jazz,” and host Nate Wilcox takes him all the way back to the start of the book, to the prehistory of the music. There is general agreement that jazz came out of New Orleans; there was a period when people disputed it, and a time when the Soviet Union claimed it started in Siberia. Ted explains why that city, why that moment - and what we can and cannot know about who played it first.
This episode originally dropped in 2021.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
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Aug 31
39 min
TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes a recording of a 1902 ‘coon song,’ presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the song’s title and in the discussion around it.
In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox discuss "Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music."
This one is about the first people the recording business ever made famous, and the wildly different deals it offered them. George Washington Johnson had no way to copy a wax cylinder, so every single one sold had to be recorded again — he sang the same laugh an estimated forty thousand times.
Ten years later Enrico Caruso sang once into a gramophone and the factory made the copies. Same business, different decades, completely different deals, and that is the story of the evolution of the American music business.
Also: radio’s sudden arrival in the 1920s and what it did to record sales, Bert Williams, Irving Berlin, and Al Jolson — the biggest entertainer in America in his day, and why almost nobody has heard him since.
With music: Caruso’s “The Lost Chord,” Bert Williams’ “Nobody” and “He’s a Cousin of Mine,” George Washington Johnson’s “Laughing Song” from the 1890s, and Jolson’s “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along,” cut for Brunswick in 1926.
This episode originally dropped in 2018.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
Also subscribe to the LET IT ROLL EXTRA feed on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast service to access the full episodes via your preferred podcast outlet. We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more.
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Aug 28
59 min
TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes a recording of a 1902 ‘coon song,’ presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the song’s title and in the discussion around it.
In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox discuss "Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music."
Peter explains how he came to take on such an ambitious project, why he started with the advent of recorded music rather than the advent of sheet music, the first format wars between Thomas Edison’s phonograph and Emile Berliner’s gramophone, the first recorded music superstars, and one unfortunate early hitmaker who found himself having to do a new recording every time a copy of his hit record was made.
This episode originally dropped in 2018.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
Also subscribe to the LET IT ROLL EXTRA feed on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast service to access the full episodes via your preferred podcast outlet. We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!
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Aug 26
48 min
We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews Gary Giddins to discuss the opening section of his classic book "Visions of Jazz" including discussions of vaudeville greats Al Jolson and Bert Williams, W.C Handy, the man who "discovered" the blues and Louis Armstrong's signifying takes on old time songs of slavery and some of the forgotten Black songwriters of 1920s Tin Pan Alley.
This episode originally dropped in 2023.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
Also subscribe to the LET IT ROLL EXTRA feed on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast service to access the full episodes via your preferred podcast outlet. We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!
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Aug 24
42 min
We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews Henry Sapoznik, one of the compilers of "Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music." Nate asks Henry about the genesis of the Protobilly CD compilation and the roots of country music in 19th-century American music.
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
Also subscribe to the LET IT ROLL EXTRA feed on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast service to access the full episodes via your preferred podcast outlet. We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!
Email [email protected]
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Aug 21
48 min
We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter.
In this episode, host Nate Wilcox is joined by Garrett Cash to continue their discussion of the evolution of American Gospel music with a look at Afro-American music in the late 19th Century.
Source materials include Robert Darden's "People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music" and "Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus: The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers and Christian Reconstruction, 1871-1878" by Toni P Anderson.
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
GO TO THE LET IT ROLL SUBSTACK TO HEAR THE FULL EPISODE -- The final 15 minutes of this episode are exclusively for paying subscribers to the Let It Roll Substack.
Also subscribe to the LET IT ROLL EXTRA feed on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast service to access the full episodes via your preferred podcast outlet. We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!
Email [email protected]
Follow us on Twitter.
Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 19
42 min
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