Lightnin' Hopkins recorded more albums than almost anyone in his genre, played Carnegie Hall, toured Japan and backed a psychedelic rock band, yet for the first half of his career he stubbornly refused to leave one street in Houston. This episode traces Samuel John Hopkins from his 1912 birth in Centerville, Texas, and a 1920 church picnic in Buffalo, Texas where the fiercely protective Blind Lemon Jefferson let an eight-year-old accompany him, through a mid-1930s stretch on the Houston County Prison Farm and a failed first run at Houston with his cousin Texas Alexander.

We break down how solitary years on rural porches forged his one-man-band technique, with thumb bass, strummed rhythm, single-note leads and percussive slaps on the guitar body all running at once, and why his 11-bar and 13-and-a-half-bar blues made him incompatible with st ...