The Same Music: The Bristol Sessions, Hank Williams, and the Lie That Split Blues from Country

Podcast: Groundwater: The Blues Beneath American Music · Thomas Stubbs

Opublikowano: 2026-07-31

In the summer of 1927, a talent scout named Ralph Peer set up a temporary recording studio on the third floor of a hat company in Bristol, Tennessee, and built the two shelves — race records and hillbilly — that still separate blues from country a century later. The split had nothing to do with the music. It had everything to do with the market. This episode takes the wall down. The Carter Family's uncredited Black song collector, Lesley Riddle, who taught Maybelle her famous guitar style. Jimmie Rodgers, the Father of Country Music, audibly singing a twelve-bar blue...