Introducing Before The Moment with Nile Rodgers

More than half of the settlers who founded Los Angeles were Black. By the 1940s the city’s Black community was an island hemmed in by restrictive housing covenants and swelling with war workers from Texas and Oklahoma - and R.J. Smith argues that this is where, more than anywhere else, the threads of rhythm and blues got pulled together. Host Nate Wilcox talks with R.J. Smith, author of “The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African American Renaissance,” in a conversation first released in 2021 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEBSITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the record business collapsed in the Depression, country music didn't go away - it moved to the radio. A record cost as much as a steak dinner, but once a family owned a set the music was free, and out of that shift came four very different kinds of star: Gene Autry's singing cowboy, Bob Wills's Western swing, Roy Acuff's Grand Ole Opry and Bill Monroe's high, lonesome road to bluegrass. Host Nate Wilcox and James Porter work through "Hard Times," the second episode of Ken Burns's "Country Music," in a conversation first released in 2021 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. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pantheon Media CEO Christian Swain invites you to check out the Before The Moment podcast. Legendary Producer Nile Rodgers sits down with artists to explore the decisions, setbacks, and unexpected encounters that came before the breakthrough. Follow the show, you will love it!

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys finally got onto the Grand Ole Opry, and the Opry made the drummer sit behind a curtain so nobody would know there were drums. Wills never went back. By then he was leading a band nobody had seen before: piano, bass and drums, plus fiddles, horns and steel guitar. “To my ears,” Ed Ward says of the Playboys taking on a Benny Goodman hit, “Bob cuts Goodman.” Host Nate Wilcox talks with the late Ed Ward, author of “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume One: 1920-1963,” in a conversation first recorded in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes back Tony Fletcher, author of “⁠All Hopped Up and Ready to Go: Music from the Streets of New York, 1927-77⁠,” to discuss the mambo explosion that kept New York City dancing from the 1930s to the 1950s and influenced both jazz and rock & roll. This episode originally dropped in 2023. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Milton Brown never had a national hit and never wrote a famous song, and he was dead at 32. But Cary Ginell argues that he did something almost nobody in popular music has done: he invented a genre single-handed. He took the Texas fiddle band, put a singer out front, added a slapped string bass, a piano and an electric steel guitar, fed it hot jazz and pop, and moved it out of the house dance and into the ballroom. We call it western swing. Host Nate Wilcox talks with Cary Ginell, author of “Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing,” in a conversation from the Let It Roll archive CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Nate Wilcox welcomes back Peter Doggett, author of “Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 Years of Pop Music,” in a conversation first released 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. It picks up where Peter’s Bing Crosby episode left off, moving from the radio era of the 1920s into the 1930s. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Nate Wilcox brings back Dr. Yuri Campbell, scholar and musician, to weigh what the previous episode’s conversation with Elijah Wald about “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues” actually taught us. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Nate Wilcox talks with Elijah Wald, author of “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues,” in a conversation first released in 2018 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning. Elijah explains why Johnson was a minor figure in his own day: the stars in his world were Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr and Peetie Wheatstraw, and what was exotic about Johnson to his neighbors was that he had traveled and sounded like the people on the records. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Nate Wilcox talks with Kevin Belford, artist, illustrator and author of “Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-War Blues Music of St. Louis, Missouri,” in a brand-new conversation recorded in October 2026. Belford makes the case for St. Louis as a blues capital the history books skipped - from Tom Turpin's ragtime to Lonnie Johnson, Peetie Wheatstraw and the original Sonny Boy Williamson. CHECK OUT THE LET IT ROLL WEB SITE -- We've got all 350+ episodes listed, organized by mini-series, genre, era, co-host, guest and more. Please sign up for the email list on the site and get music essays from Nate as well as (eventually) transcriptions of every episode. Also if you can afford it please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show. Thanks! Have a question or a suggestion for a topic or person for Nate to interview? Email [email protected] Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Facebook. Let It Roll is proud to be part of Pantheon Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices