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.
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Sep 28
50 min
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.
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 25
35 min
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 recast in chronological order by topic.
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 23
52 min
In this episode, host Nate Wilcox welcomes Elijah Wald to discuss his controversial but informative book "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll" which actually has a lot more to say about Paul Whiteman and why white America considered him the King of Jazz in the 1920s.
This episode originally dropped in 2018.
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Sep 21
1 hr
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 to the End, in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic.
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 18
31 min
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.
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 16
43 min
Host Nate Wilcox asks Michael Corcoran to share the stories of Texas gospel greats Arizona Dranes, Blind Willie Johnson and Washington Phillips as well as the notorious Don Robey, owner of the Duke and Peacock labels.
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 14
51 min
Host Nate Wilcox and Ted Anthony, author of “Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song”, work through what a “version” even is when a song has thousands of them: the keyboard solo, the famous opening riff, who heard what from whom, and Anthony’s conclusion that we are never going to sort it out and that this is fine. Songs like this one came out of nowhere, moved around in the shadows, surfaced when they got popular, and went back into the shadows to mutate again.
We’re re-presenting this episode which originally dropped in 2019, as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning…to the End series which puts all the episodes in chronological order by subject.
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 11
40 min
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.
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 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.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!
Email [email protected]
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Sep 7
36 min
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