In late 1938, producer John Hammond needed a raw Delta bluesman to replace the recently deceased Robert Johnson at his From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. He called Big Bill Broonzy, expecting a rustic country performer. What he got was a sophisticated urban pioneer already laying the groundwork for electric Chicago blues. This episode unpacks the life of a musical chameleon whose birth year and birthplace remain disputed, who claimed wartime service he almost certainly never saw, and who adapted his sound to whatever each audience demanded.

We follow Broonzy from a cigar box fiddle and segregated two-way picnics in Arkansas through the Great Migration to Chicago in 1920, where he learned guitar from Papa Charlie Jackson, worked as a Pullman porter and foundry laborer, and forged his percussive style at rent parties. The epis ...