Reverend Gary Davis was a blind street preacher who could nap backstage at a New York club, wake up, walk on stage, and unleash a guitar performance that left audiences stunned before going right back to sleep. Born in 1896 in the Piedmont region of South Carolina, he lost his sight as an infant, lost his father at ten, and spent decades busking for spare change. Yet he became a foundational influence on Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones. This episode traces how a boy who built instruments from wire, sticks, and tin pans synthesized ragtime, blues, and marching band music into an original and fiercely difficult guitar style.

We follow Davis from Greenville string bands with Willie Walker to the tobacco-town scene of Durham, North Carolina, where he mentored Blind Boy Fuller, his ordination as a minister in 1937, and a 193 ...