Arthur Blake, known to the world as Blind Blake, was a guitar genius who mapped the independent left-hand and right-hand roles of ragtime piano onto six strings, laid the blueprint for Piedmont blues, and recorded roughly 80 tracks for Paramount Records between 1926 and 1932. Then he vanished so completely that fellow musicians invented stories of a streetcar accident or a fatal Chicago blizzard, while the truth stayed buried in an unmarked grave in Glendale, Wisconsin, for nearly 80 years.

This episode untangles the man from the myth. We examine why Paramount marketed him as a Jacksonville, Florida, native, why historians heard Gullah Geechee dialect in his recordings, and why Blind Willie McTell insisted his name was Arthur Phelps. Then we turn to the 2011 research led by Alex van der Tuuk, published in Blues and Rhythm, which located his ...