In 1986 a sold-out Paris blues club watched a solo artist generate a hypnotic wall of rhythm with the authority of a lifelong touring star. A few years earlier she had been playing the same music at family picnics in Mississippi. This episode tells the story of Jessie Mae Hemphill, born in 1923 near Como and Senatobia in the north Mississippi hill country, where the music grew out of African-rooted fife and drum bands rather than Delta chord progressions. She started guitar at seven and played snare and bass drum in the fife and drum band led by her grandfather Sid Hemphill, and for more than half a century her stage was the backyard barbecue and the community gathering.

We trace how researchers George Mitchell and David Evans recorded her in 1967 and 1973, how Evans' move to Memphis and the founding of the university-backed High Water Reco ...