Let It Roll EXTRA

About Let It Roll EXTRA

Nate Wilcox's "Let it Roll" is a podcast about the history of popular music from the 19th Century to the 21st. letitrollpodcast.substack.com (https://letitrollpodcast.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Nate Wilcox

Category

history · music

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 Dec 2024

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

228 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Oct 2026

   The Songs Jazz is Built On: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.3

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com (https://letitrollpodcast.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) Show up to a jazz gig and there is no rehearsal. The bandleader calls a tune and expects you to know it, and if you don’t, you are not working next week. Ted Gioia used to write lists of those tunes for his piano students - what to learn, in what key - until he realised nobody had ever written the book. So he did. Host Nate Wilcox is joined again by Ted Gioia, author of “The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, (https://amzn.to/470Vb1u)” 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. Nate and Ted take four songs and hear each one twice. “St. Louis Blues,” the song that carried the blues into mainstream American pop, starting with W.C. Handy in a Mississippi train station around 1903, listening to a man play guitar with a knife - heard first as Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, then as Django Reinhardt made it over in Paris. “I Got Rhythm,” one of the simplest songs Gershwin ever wrote, and the reason it became the most borrowed chord progression in jazz, under “Cotton Tail,” “Anthropology,” “Oleo” and “Rhythm-a-Ning.” Also: Jerome Kern, who hated jazz musicians playing his songs - and whose estate, Ted notes, has never sent back a royalty check; Benny Goodman, the biggest pop star in America, commissioning Bartok and Copland; how “Night Train” came out of Duke Ellington’s band; Dave Brubeck refusing to play “Take Five” the same way twice; why “Donna Lee” may really be Miles Davis’s; and why Burt Bacharach’s songs scare jazz players off. After the paywall: Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” turning into the R&B smash “The Hucklebuck” (danced on The Honeymooners), “Donna Lee,” Monk, Mingus and Bacharach, and “My Favorite Things,” from Julie Andrews singing it to children to John Coltrane “exploding it into a million beautiful pieces” - plus Ted’s one wish for jazz, that its musicians would start playing each other’s songs again. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “St. Louis Blues,” Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong * “St. Louis Blues,” Django Reinhardt * “I Got Rhythm,” Louis Armstrong * “I Got Rhythm,” The Esquire All-Stars * “Now’s the Time,” Charlie Parker * “The Hucklebuck,” Paul Williams * “My Favorite Things,” Julie Andrews - The Sound of Music * “My Favorite Things,” John Coltrane 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.

2. 

   9 Oct 2026

   Record Men From Thomas Edison to John Hammond & Chris Blackwell: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.2

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com (https://letitrollpodcast.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) 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, (https://amzn.to/47yyHoB)” in a conversation first recorded in 2022 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning. It starts with Thomas Edison, who Murphy suspects did not invent half of what he patented, losing the format war to Emile Berliner and the Victor Talking Machine Company - not on technology but on content, because Victor found Enrico Caruso, the first superstar of the recording age, and hid the ugly horn inside a cabinet so women would let it into the parlor. The pitch was opera at home - high culture for people who could never afford a seat - and, as Nate puts it, opera then was not just high culture but mass culture: Caruso moved millions of records. Then John Hammond, the rich kid who did not need a salary and so could afford to be right: Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman’s integrated bands, From Spirituals to Swing at Carnegie Hall, and, years later at Columbia under his old friend Goddard Lieberson, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan. Also Mitch Miller, who Nate argues invented studio recording as we know it, and the jukebox, the shellac shortage and the musicians’ strike that remade the business in the 1940s. Then the indies, and Britain: Chris Blackwell of Island Records - born in Jamaica, half Sephardic and half Irish, raised around Ian Fleming - and the long slog of breaking Bob Marley, which finally happened by way of Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” Murphy on why every English label that tried to conquer America nearly went broke doing it, and on the Go-Go film that almost sank Island. After the paywall: Geoff Travis and Rough Trade, the indie distribution network that built the Smiths, New Order and Depeche Mode and was then killed by its own success; Martin Mills and Beggars Banquet, the survivors; and why Murphy thinks streaming has already brought the record business back to life. MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE * “E lucevan le stelle,” Enrico Caruso * “God Bless the Child,” Billie Holiday * “Concrete Jungle,” Bob Marley and the Wailers * “How Soon Is Now?,” The Smiths 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.

3. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Bing Crosby's Swing Brought Him Superstardom: Let It Roll From the Beginning... 4.1

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit letitrollpodcast.substack.com (https://letitrollpodcast.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) Gary Giddins agreed to write a 300-page Bing Crosby book in three years so he could get back to Duke Ellington. That was more than twenty-five years ago. He started out half-believing the hatchet jobs and found instead a man the people he interviewed kept calling the nicest, kindest and most generous they ever worked with, a Republican who was ahead of …

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 23 / 100

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Quality

47

Social presence

0

YouTube

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Engagement

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