Let It Roll

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys finally got onto the Grand Ole Opry, and the Opry made the drummer sit behind a curtain so nobody would know there were drums. Wills never went back. By then he was leading a band nobody had seen before: piano, bass and drums, plus fiddles, horns and steel guitar. “To my ears,” Ed Ward says of the Playboys taking on a Benny Goodman hit, “Bob cuts Goodman.”

Host Nate Wilcox talks with the late Ed Ward, author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume One: 1920-1963,” in a conversation first recorded in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning.

CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!

Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com

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Host Nate Wilcox welcomes back Tony Fletcher, author of “⁠All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York, 1927-77⁠,” to discuss the mambo explosion that kept New York City dancing from the 1930s to the 1950s and influenced both jazz and rock & roll.
This episode originally dropped in 2023.

CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!

Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com

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Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pantheon Media CEO Christian Swain invites you to check out the Before The Moment podcast. Legendary Producer Nile Rodgers sits down with artists to explore the decisions, setbacks, and unexpected encounters that came before the breakthrough. Follow the show, you will love it!

Milton Brown never had a national hit and never wrote a famous song, and he was dead at 32. But Cary Ginell argues that he did something almost nobody in popular music has done: he invented a genre single-handed. He took the Texas fiddle band, put a singer out front, added a slapped string bass, a piano and an electric steel guitar, fed it hot jazz and pop, and moved it out of the house dance and into the ballroom. We call it western swing.

Host Nate Wilcox talks with Cary Ginell, author of “Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing,” in a conversation from the Let It Roll archive

CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!

Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com

Follow us on Twitter.

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Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.
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Host Nate Wilcox welcomes back Peter Doggett, author of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop Music,” in a conversation first released 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. It picks up where Peter’s Bing Crosby episode left off, moving from the radio era of the 1920s into the 1930s.

CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks!

Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email letitrollpodcast@gmail.com

Follow us on Twitter.

Follow us on Facebook.

Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices