In a busy Philadelphia hotel lobby in 1959, a 60-year-old janitor pushed a broom past businessmen and tourists who had no idea he had essentially invented the modern guitar solo, shaped the vocal style of Elvis Presley, and recorded with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. This episode reconstructs the roller-coaster life of Alonzo "Lonnie" Johnson, a New Orleans-born genius who was famous, forgotten, rediscovered, and still died in poverty.

We begin in a household where music was the primary language, follow his 1917 tour of England, and confront the devastation he found on returning in 1919, when the influenza pandemic had killed nearly his entire family. We trace his move to St. Louis, the 1925 blues contest that won him an OKeh Records contract, roughly 130 sides between 1925 and 1932, the pick-driven single-note lines, string bending,  ...