Earl Scruggs: Three Fingers That Changed Banjo Forever
A 10-year-old boy storming off to his bedroom after a fight with his brother accidentally invented the three-finger roll that changed the banjo forever. Earl Scruggs took an instrument known as a come...
11 Jun 19min
David Allan Coe: The Outlaw Who Lived in a Hearse
A hearse pulls up outside Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in 1967, and the man who steps out has been living in the back of it. David Allan Coe — ex-convict, street busker, and one of outlaw country musi...
11 Jun 25min
Turnpike Troubadours: The Band That Walked Away to Survive
What kind of band cancels everything — sold-out venues, Billboard chart success, a fiercely loyal fan base — and walks away indefinitely? The Turnpike Troubadours, the fiercely independent country ban...
11 Jun 18min
Tyler Childers: Reclaiming Country Music for Appalachia
When Tyler Childers won Emerging Artist of the Year at the 2018 Americana Music Honors and Awards, he stepped to the microphone and dismantled the very genre honoring him. The Kentucky-born country an...
11 Jun 19min
Webb Pierce: The Honky-Tonk King and His Guitar-Shaped Pool
He spent 113 weeks at number one on the country charts — a dominance no modern superstar has matched — yet Webb Pierce is best remembered for a $30,000 guitar-shaped swimming pool that sparked a neigh...
11 Jun 20min
Whitey Morgan: Outlaw Country Forged in Flint, Michigan
Outlaw country music is supposed to come from the dusty plains of Texas or the neon honky-tonks of Tennessee. Whitey Morgan forged it instead in Flint, Michigan, turning rust-belt, blue-collar grit in...
11 Jun 17min
Amanda Shires: From a Pawn Shop Fiddle to The Highwomen
A ten-year-old girl wanders a dusty pawn shop in Mineral Wells, Texas, and begs her dad for a cheap, unremarkable fiddle. That impulse buy launched Amanda Shires, the fiddle prodigy and singer-songwri...
11 Jun 20min
Johannes Kepler: The Mystic Who Found the Math Behind the Planets
In this episode of pplpod, we explore the life of Johannes Kepler, the brilliant and deeply unusual thinker who helped move astronomy from ancient geometry into modern physics. The episode begins with...
10 Jun 21min
