In 1963, a young blues scout named Tom Hoskins drove from Washington, D.C. to a wooden cabin in Avalon, Mississippi and asked a 70-something sharecropper to pick up a guitar and prove he was the man who had recorded a handful of obscure sides for Okeh Records in 1928. The clue that led him there was hidden in a song title: Avalon Blues. This episode reconstructs the life of Mississippi John Hurt, born John Smith Hurt in the 1890s in Teoc, Mississippi to formerly enslaved sharecropping parents. At nine he secretly taught himself on a guitar belonging to a boarder, William Henry Carson, whenever the man left to court a local woman, developing a delicate ragtime-influenced fingerpicking style with an alternating thumb bass and syncopated melodies, far from the heavy slide-driven Delta blues usually associated with the state.

The conversation f ...