Host Nate Wilcox talks with Chuck Haddix, co-author with Frank Driggs of “Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History,” in a conversation first released in 2020 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. This is the story of how one wide-open Midwestern town got from ragtime to bebop in twenty years, and set up swing, jump blues and rock and roll on the way.
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Oct 19
46 min
Host Nate Wilcox talks with Dave Thompson, author of “An Evolving Tradition: The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock Music,” in a conversation first released in 2025 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 subject matter. This is the moment the old ballads stopped passing from grandparent to grandchild and started arriving by record, radio and movie soundtrack - the run-up to the first folk revival.
This episode originally dropped in 2025.
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Oct 16
50 min
Host Nate Wilcox and the late Ed Ward, author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume One: 1920-1963,” close Season 3 of Let It Roll From the Beginning... with a conversation first recorded in 2018. This is the gap between the 1920s and the birth of rock and roll: how African American pop music went from the blues queens through the swing era to rhythm and blues.
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Oct 14
56 min
Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Ted Gioia, author of “The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire,” in a conversation first recorded in 2019 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.
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Oct 13
39 min
Gareth Murphy set out to write an obituary for the record man. A French label boss had told him over lunch that the record producer was a dying breed, and in the 2010s, with the industry shrinking every year since 1999, it looked like he was right. Then Murphy went back to the beginning, found the same collapse in the 1920s and again in the Depression, and came out the other side with the opposite conclusion: the record business is cyclical, it has to go extinct now and then, and it always comes back.
Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Gareth Murphy, author of “Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry,” in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning.
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Oct 9
50 min
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Oct 7
44 min
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.
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Oct 5
38 min
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.
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Oct 2
46 min
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.
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Sep 30
41 min
Host Nate Wilcox is joined by James Porter - Chicago writer, DJ and musician - to open CountryRoll, their run through Ken Burns’s “Country Music” 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.
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 28
50 min
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