Pink Floyd's 1973 album stayed on the Billboard charts for 14 years, but the man behind half of the band's name spent much of his life playing acoustic guitar for loose change in the dirt lots of South Carolina. This episode reconstructs the life of Pinkney Anderson, known as Pink, born February 12, 1900 and raised around Greenville and Spartanburg. At 14 he joined Dr. William R. Kerr's Indian Remedy Company, a traveling medicine show in which his music drew the crowd and the doctor sold the tonics. Far from a teenage phase, the medicine show circuit remained his primary livelihood into the 1950s, touring with a Potawatomi performer billed as Chief Thundercloud and with harmonica player Arthur Jackson, known as Peg Leg Sam.

We trace his 1928 Columbia recordings with Blind Simmie Dooley, including Papa's 'Bout to Get Mad and Every Day in the ...