Welcome to the New York Times Popcasts, your car chill duet of music news and criticism.

I am your host, John Caramonica.

Well, I got my first truck when I was three drove a hundred thousand miles on my knees

hauled marbles and rocks and thought twice before I hauled a Barbie doll bed for the girl next door

She tried to pay me with a kiss and I began to understand

There's something women like about a pickup man

Look you guys have been going through the same pandemic that I've been going through. It's been five months. One of the tough parts, especially in the first month or two, was the sense that the coronavirus was taking people at a kind of unbearable clip.

And I found myself writing a bunch of obituaries and musicians, especially in those first couple of months.

And you know, as a journalist and as a critic, it's a challenge to see what happens when a health crisis like this really starts to decimate a population,

what I don't want to get lost is the joy and the thrill of the music made by those people. And so what I wanted to do on Popcast, and this will be the first episode, I think we're going to do this one to ten, who knows, a couple more times,

is I wanted to spotlight a few of the musicians

that we've lost, tell their stories, play their music,

and really basically have a week. Let's celebrate what they did. And so on this

week's episode we're gonna have three segments talking about three artists.

So to talk about DJ Black and Mild, we're going to call in with Elena Bergeron, who is an editor on the sports desk at the times, and most crucially, is from New Orleans.

From Nesham Wooden, we're going to talk to Jacob Bernstein, who is a writer at the time Stiles desk.

First off, we are going to talk about Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe Diffie.

Joe died at 61 early in the coronavirus pandemic. Joe Diffie was in the early 90s, very much a star of his time. Party records, ballads, down home, little bit of a sense of humor, not the arena-sized stuff that was happening around him, not exactly the same stuff, but very much in the vein of the superstars of that era.

And if we're talking Joe Diffie, you know we're talking to Holly Gleason.

Holly, how are you?

I'm happy to be here.

Holly, I want to say, first off, you're one of the first people in Nashville that was ever nice to me.

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