Half a million people at Woodstock in 1969 swayed to Canned Heat's Going Up the Country without knowing its bouncing melody and distinctive solo came from a man born to freed slaves in Texas nearly a century earlier. This episode pieces together the fragmented life of Henry Thomas, billed in his day as Ragtime Texas. Born in 1874 in Big Sandy, Texas, Thomas rejected sharecropping as a teenager, hopped freight trains and earned his living as an itinerant songster, a one-man vaudeville act who had to play whatever a crowd demanded: minstrel songs, gospel, dance reels, ragtime and the earliest iterations of the blues. The railroads were the cultural arteries of the era, and Thomas cross-pollinated regional sounds across the American South.

We break down his unique technique, a guitar style derived from banjo picking paired with the quills, a s ...