Down In the Flood

Roebuck "Pops" Staples, founder of The Staple Singers, is a forgotten master--a singer, songwriter, bandleader and guitarist whose music formed a direct bridge between the likes of Charley Patton and the likes of Bob Dylan. Born in Winona, MS in...

It's year-end list-making time, and DITF celebrates our records of the year: Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937 You Ain't Talkin to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music Soul's Chapel - Marty...

For most of the last 50 years blackface minstrelsy has been a taboo topic. The very image of men in burnt cork blackface has been a shocking symbol of national shame ever since Brown v. Board of Education started the...

What is this thing we call "rocking"? A sound, a state of mind, a beat....More than the stomp of ragtime or the backbeat of jazz, rocking is the sound of a perpetual downstroke. Not 1-2-3-4, but 1-1-1-1. All drive drive...

In the early days of gospel music there were two ways of singing. The first style came out of the post-Civil War black universities where groups harmonized on spirituals that were old even then, rolling their R's and clicking their...

This is the tale of two men, two black men, two tough sons of bitches immortalized in American song. Two ballads and identities that tell us all we need to know about sex, and race, and danger in America's first...

Every Down in the Flood podcast is a celebration of American culture, that bastard, contradictory morass of our basest desires and our highest ideals. After all, American music sounds the way it does because it expresses and resolves the core...

The lonesome swoop of the steel guitar is one of the most immediately identifiable sounds in American music, a distinguishing mark of honky tonk authenticity. But steel guitar playing in America precedes the honky tonk genre by almost 50 years...

If Sister Rosetta Tharpe had been a secular singer she would be hailed today as the original female rocker, a giant one par with genre defining greats like Hank Williams and Muddy Waters, a figure as revered as her contemporaries...

The Big Bang of rock and roll came in the form of two records cut less than 12 months apart --one by a teenaged Tennesse truckdriver, the other by a 30-year-old veteran chitlin' circuit guitar player from St. Louis. One...