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 where West African drumming survived openly. This episode traces how geography, French colonial law, the Haitian Revolution, and an accident of empire produced the foundation of every musical tradition the United States would invent — jazz, blues, country, rock and roll, R&B, funk, hip-hop. The city is still sinking. The music is still rising.Groundwater is a music history podcast about American popular music — the blues, country, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and the artificial boundaries the recording industry built between them in 1927.The show argues three things. First, that the blues-country split we inherited was manufactured by record labels at the Bristol Sessions — Ralph Peer building two shelves out of the same music. Second, that the blues is not a genre at all but the groundwater beneath all of American popular music, surfacing in country, rock, jazz, and hip-hop. Third, that when the music got political, the state did not ban the songs. It went after the singers — through drug charges, tax investigations, and loyalty tests, from Billie Holiday through the Dixie Chicks.The show is hosted by Thomas Stubbs and adapted from his forthcoming book Race Records: The Lie That Split American Music — and the Blues That Ran Underneath. The first three episodes work through Chapter 1, The Mouth of the River, tracing the music from Congo Square through Storyville and Louis Armstrong to the second-line beat that runs through New Orleans today.If you've read Robert Palmer's Deep Blues, Greil Marcus's Mystery Train, or Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop — or if you'd like a podcast that takes pop music as seriously as those books did — this show is for you.New episodes posted regularly. Listen anywhere you get podcasts.