Josh White was the first African-American male to become a national sex symbol, the first in his genre to sell a million records, the first to tour segregated venues with a white female co-star, and the first to give a command performance at the White House. Yet for many today he is a ghost in the pop culture machine, his fame nearly erased by Cold War politics. This episode follows his life from Greenville, South Carolina, where at age seven he watched his father beaten into permanent brain damage by local authorities, into years as a barefoot lead boy guiding blind street musicians like Blind Blake and Blind Joe Taggart through the Jim Crow South.

We trace how he reverse-engineered Piedmont blues by watching the hands of the masters he guided, how Paramount's Mayo Williams discovered him in Chicago in 1927, and why his first purchase with ...