In 1964, three young blues researchers knocked on the door of a retired railroad porter in Rochester, New York, and had to inform him that he was famous. Edward James House Jr., known as Son House, had walked away from music in 1943 and had no idea that a new generation regarded his 1930 Paramount recordings as sacred texts of Delta blues. Born in 1902 near Lyon, Mississippi, House grew up watching his musician father swing between heavy drinking and the deaconship of a Baptist church. He rejected instruments entirely, despised the blues as sinful, and was preaching sermons by age 15 in Algiers, Louisiana.

This episode follows House's collapse of faith through a bitter marriage and grueling plantation labor, the double life of preaching on Sunday and drinking on Saturday, and the 1927 night in a juke joint when bottleneck slide guitar hit h ...