Pop Music Pirates

October 12, 1820. John James Audubon—a failed shopkeeper, grist miller, and steamboat investor—sets off from Cincinnati on a flatboat down the Ohio River. He is bankrupt. The bank has taken everything except his clothes, his gun, and a portfolio of 62 bird drawings. His plan is t ...  Show more

October 7, 1827. A body washes up on the shore of Lake Ontario. A Rochester newspaperman named Thurlow Weed believes he knows whose it is: William Morgan, a down-on-his-luck ex-Freemason who threatened to publish the order's secrets. He was pulled from a jail in Canandaigua a yea ...  Show more

Pirate radio started out in England as a way to sidestep the regulations of Big Radio. While outlawed, it still exists today in the UK and America. Learn all about it today.

Today's episode begins with rock & roll and ends with royalty. When bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were becoming popular, they weren't played much on the radio in England. The BBC controlled the airwaves at the time, and some listeners described its music offerings ...  Show more

We have explored the motive, but what about the method?Tommie hears from some of England’s most well-known pirate broadcasters. These pirate radio DJs weren’t messing around, they took their craft seriously, they loved what they did and they were willing to take risks.A new two-p ...  Show more

This week the boys once again embark upon the choppy (and sometimes bloody) seas of pirate history, covering the pivotal years of Blackbeard's life as his chaotic reign worked its way across the Caribbean coastline.

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