pplpod

Ashley McBryde spent years driving between dive bars across Arkansas and the South, playing for gas money and sleeping in her car. Nashville had no interest in a stocky, plainspoken woman who wrote so...

14 Jun 17min

Before Kid Rock became one of the most polarizing figures in American music, he was a kid from a small Michigan town with an outsized ambition and no clear lane to drive in. His path from Navy barrack...

14 Jun 20min

Crystal Gayle had everything working against her from the start. As Loretta Lynn's youngest sister, she entered the music industry with a famous last name and an impossible comparison. Every stage she...

14 Jun 20min

Before Cody Jinks sold out arenas as a country artist, he was the frontman of a thrash metal band called Unchecked Aggression. That whiplash-inducing career pivot sounds like a punchline, but it's act...

14 Jun 20min

Billy Strings doesn't look or sound like any bluegrass musician you've seen before. Covered in tattoos and raised on a volatile diet of metal, punk, and traditional picking, he fused genres that suppo...

14 Jun 17min

John Michael Montgomery's voice was one of the most commercially powerful instruments in 1990s country music. 'I Swear' crossed over to become a global pop phenomenon, and his string of hits made him ...

14 Jun 23min

Connie Smith never wanted to be famous. Bill Anderson discovered her at a talent contest, handed her a hit song called 'Once a Day,' and watched it spend eight consecutive weeks at number one—the long...

14 Jun 22min

Western swing—the genre that fused big band jazz, fiddle breakdowns, and Texas dance hall energy—got an unlikely upgrade when a Princeton-educated engineer applied analytical precision to its freewhee...

14 Jun 19min