At fifteen, while the British Invasion saturated the radio, Rory Block packed a bag and left home to find the aging originators of the Mississippi Delta and Piedmont blues while they were still alive. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1949 and raised in Greenwich Village, she grew up in her father Allan Block's sandal shop, an incubator of the folk revival where Peter Rowan, Maria Muldaur, and John Sebastian hung around picking in the back room. This episode traces how a classically trained teenager became one of the most respected modern masters of country blues by learning face to face from Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, and Son House.

We look at how classical right-hand discipline prepared her for the polyphonic thumb-and-finger demands of Delta blues after Stefan Grossman introduced her to the old 78s at fourteen, the infor ...