Groundwater: The Blues Beneath American Music - podcast cover

Groundwater: The Blues Beneath American Music

Thomas Stubbs•groundwater.fm
Music
Music History
Music Commentary
In 1927, the record industry divided American music in two and sold it to separate audiences. We've believed the split ever since. Groundwater is a music history podcast that follows the current underneath — the blues running from Congo Square to the South Bronx, from Robert Johnson to Aretha Franklin to hip-hop. Each episode traces the moments that connected what the industry kept separate: Muscle Shoals and the soul sessions that crossed every line, Louis Armstrong navigating race and commerce in New Orleans and Chicago, the Great Migration that carried the Delta sound up the Illinois Central to Memphis, Chicago, and Detroit, and what happened when artists like Muddy Waters, Otis Redding, and Nina Simone made the music political and the state went after them. If you love music — and want to understand why American music sounds the way it does — start here and follow the water. Hosted by Thomas Stubbs.
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Episodes

Twelfth Street Station: The Great Migration and How New Orleans Music Reached Chicago

The music didn’t ride north on riverboats. It rode the Illinois Central Railroad — out of New Orleans, up through Memphis and the Mississippi Delta into Chicago — in the luggage cars and Jim Crow coaches of the Great Migration. Episode 4 of Groundwater traces what the music became when it left the South: Louis Armstrong stepping off the train at Twelfth Street Station in 1922 with a cornet and a fish sandwich; King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Armstrong’s first recorded solo; the Hot Five’s “We...

Jun 09, 2026•14 min•Ep. 4

The Drain: New Orleans Music From Professor Longhair to Katrina

Professor Longhair kicked the bass of his piano to keep time. The Meters stripped the second line down to funk. Then the levees broke. New Orleans music from Longhair to Katrina Armstrong left. Bechet left. Oliver left. Morton left. For thirty years, the romantic version of the story held that New Orleans jazz had migrated north and the city was living on memory. It was wrong. The city never stopped cooking. This episode traces the music that stayed: Professor Longhair’s rumba-boogie on a piano ...

May 26, 2026•17 min•Ep. 3

Little Louis: Louis Armstrong and the Birth of Jazz

The first jazz musician is a ghost — no recording of Buddy Bolden survives. This is the story of the music from Bolden through Storyville to the kid who became Louis Armstrong. What we know about him comes from the testimony of people who heard him play, filtered through decades of memory and myth. This episode traces the music from Bolden through the legalized vice district of Storyville to a kid from the Battlefield neighborhood who walked into a pawn shop with two dollars from a Lithuanian Je...

May 07, 2026•16 min•Ep. 2

Below Sea Level: How New Orleans Built American Music

New Orleans should not exist — a city in a swamp, below sea level, at the mouth of a continent. It became the place that built American music: jazz, blues, R&B, funk, rock and roll. New Orleans was founded in 1718 in a swamp, below sea level, by people who needed someone standing at the mouth of the continent. Within a year, the first ship carrying enslaved people arrived. A century later, a French slave code with a Sunday loophole would create the only space in slave-holding North America w...

May 07, 2026•16 min•Ep. 1
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