This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com
In 1946 Louis Jordan had the number one record on the R&B chart for most of the year. He crossed over to pop, he was in the movies, Chuck Berry admitted to the day he died that Jordan was who he had set out to be - and Jordan lived until 1975 and could not buy a hit. Ed Ward knew why. “The clown always winds up hurting himself,” he says. “When they stop laughing, you’re dead.”
Host Nate Wilcox and the late Ed Ward, author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume One: 1920-1963,” continue Season 4 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.
It starts with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith - professional entertainers in gowns and fake jewelry, singing with horn bands, a long way from the lone man with a guitar most people now picture when they hear the word blues. Then the Depression, which wiped out the market for both, and John Hammond, who got Bessie Smith one last session with an integrated band of A-list players, and then spread a story about her death that was not true. The sharpest point in the hour: collectors turned the records they could not find into legends and forgot the ones everybody already owned. Skip James sold a few records and became a myth. Leroy Carr sold millions, shaped Charles Brown, Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, and got forgotten.
Also: the Bluebird label’s house band and Big Bill Broonzy’s career-long claim to be the last Delta bluesman alive; Georgia Tom, who became Thomas A. Dorsey; boogie-woogie at Carnegie Hall’s From Spirituals to Swing; Lonnie Johnson, who held his own with Eddie Lang and retired to work as a hotel doorman; T-Bone Walker, single-note guitar and the night Ed watched a pickup band mock him behind his back at Max’s Kansas City; Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home”; and Nat King Cole, who refused to stay in South Central.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* Bessie Smith, “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer”
* Leroy Carr with Scrapper Blackwell, “How Long, How Long Blues”
* T-Bone Walker, “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)”
* Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens”
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.
