Imagine laying down a track whose central theme would be adapted by Muddy Waters and inspire the name of the Rolling Stones, then leaving behind exactly 16 recorded songs, a single photograph and no trace of where you went. This episode tracks Robert Petway, a phantom of the Mississippi Delta blues. Researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc place his birth around 1902 or 1903 in Itta Bena, Leflore County, Mississippi, though a competing theory puts him in Gee's Bend, Alabama in 1907 and living until 1978 in Chicago. Census records list a Robert Pettyway, age seven, in 1910 and a Robert Pettaway, age 18, working a farm in 1920, phonetic spellings written down by census takers who treated sharecroppers as labor rather than citizens.

We follow Petway's defining partnership with Tommy McClennan, both laborers at a firm called Williams and Applewhi ...