Let It Roll
"Let it Roll" is a podcast about the history of popular music from the 19th Century to the 21st. Proud part of Pantheon - the podcast network for music lovers.
Episodes
September 25, 2026 • 35 mins
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.
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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.
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September 21, 2026 • 60 mins
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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September 18, 2026 • 31 mins
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.
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September 16, 2026 • 43 mins
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.
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September 14, 2026 • 51 mins
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 sub...
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September 11, 2026 • 40 mins
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, su...
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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...
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September 7, 2026 • 36 mins
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 an...
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September 4, 2026 • 38 mins
Host Nate Wilcox welcomes James Kaplan to discuss his book “Irving Berlin: New York Genius” — a life that runs from a Lower East Side childhood to a fifty-year career at the centre of American popular song, and then to almost thirty years of silence.
Jerome Kern’s line is the one everybody quotes, and it holds up: Berlin has no place in American music, he is American music.
Kaplan and Nate draw the compar...
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September 2, 2026 • 44 mins
Host Nate Wilcox was joined again by Garrett Cash for the second episode of the Holy Roll series which we’re recasting as part of our Let It Roll: From the Beginning… series, this time on the two people who essentially invented gospel composition as a published, professional craft — Charles Albert Tindley and Lucie E. Campbell.
The book under discussion is “We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pione...
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August 31, 2026 • 39 mins
We're continuing our recast of all the Let It Roll episodes in chronological order by topic with Ted Gioia on “The History of Jazz,” and host Nate Wilcox takes him all the way back to the start of the book, to the prehistory of the music. There is general agreement that jazz came out of New Orleans; there was a period when people disputed it, and a time when the Soviet Union claimed it started in Siberia. Ted explains ...
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TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes a recording of a 1902 ‘coon song,’ presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the song’s title and in the discussion around it.
In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox discuss "Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music."
This one is about the first people the re...
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August 26, 2026 • 48 mins
TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes a recording of a 1902 ‘coon song,’ presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the song’s title and in the discussion around it.
In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox discuss "Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music."
Peter explains how he came to take on suc...
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We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews Gary Giddins to discuss the opening section of his classic book "Visions of Jazz" including discussions of vaudeville greats Al Jolson and Bert Williams, W.C Handy, the man who "discovered" the blues and Louis Armstrong's signifying takes on old time songs of slavery and some of the forgot...
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August 21, 2026 • 48 mins
We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews Henry Sapoznik, one of the compilers of "Protobilly: The Minstrel & Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music." Nate asks Henry about the genesis of the Protobilly CD compilation and the roots of country music in 19th-century American music.
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
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We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter.
In this episode, host Nate Wilcox is joined by Garrett Cash to continue their discussion of the evolution of American Gospel music with a look at Afro-American music in the late 19th Century.
Source materials include Robert Darden's "People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music" and "Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesu...
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August 17, 2026 • 44 mins
We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter.
In this episode, host Nate Wilcox is joined by author David Wondrich, to discuss his overlooked classic: “Stomp and Swerve: How American Music Got Hot 1843-1924.” In this episode, David takes Nate way way back into the history of American music, long before the invention of recording, to discuss how African-derived musi...
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August 14, 2026 • 45 mins
We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews author Dale Cockrell about the musical ferment bubbling under the New York demimonde in the 1800s as described in his book "Everybody's Doin' It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917".
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
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August 12, 2026 • 43 mins
We're relaunching Let It Roll by reposting every episode in chronological order by subject matter. In this episode, host Nate Wilcox interviews Emily Bingham, the author of "My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song."
Host Nate Wilcox asks Emily to detail the 150 years of myth-making around Stephen Foster's song.
This episode originally dropped in 2022.
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