KCRW’s Lost Notes Podcast Returns to Explore the Stories and Scenes of LA’s Historical Soul and R&B Scene

KCRW’s acclaimed music documentary podcast, Lost Notes, returns for its fourth season on March 13, 2024. Co-hosts Novena Carmel (KCRW) and Michael Barnes (KCRW / KPFK / Artform Radio) guide you through eight wildly different and deeply human stories, each set against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of LA’s soul and R&B scene of the 1950s-1970s.

Stories include:

• Gloria Jones was a gospel-trained teenage singer from LA whose greatest hit - 1965’s “Tainted Love” - was never quite hers. But she went on to lead a double life as a hit songwriter for some of the greatest artists of all time … until a fortuitous rediscovery led to her coronation as the Queen of Northern Soul.
• Fela Kuti is known today as an iconic artist, innovator, and revolutionary … but in 1969, he was broke, exhausted, and in hot water with the Feds after a disastrous American tour. Yet a chance meeting transformed his musical and political consciousness, creating what we now know as Afrobeat right here on the streets of LA.
• For decades, Ruth Dolphin was only thought of as “Mrs. John Dolphin” - the wife of the Dolphin’s of Hollywood record man, who was murdered in February 1958. But now, for the first time, we set the record straight on Ruth’s own unique and unsung genius as the head of a revived and thriving LA musical empire in the decades that followed.

Other stories run the gamut from the secret Hollywood hideout of a pair of legendary musical brothers; the surprising cultural intersections behind a Chicano rock classic; and the darkly hilarious schemes of a female record-label magnate, who instigated one of the most absurd court cases in music history.

Crammed with rigorous and original research, delivered in lively and hilarious banter, and soundtracked by cratefuls of incredible music, Lost Notes delivers another knockout slate of first-rate music journalism, dressed in a characteristically gorgeous sonic setting. It’s a must-listen event for any aficionado of music history and great storytelling.