Otis Spann laid the piano foundation beneath Muddy Waters, recorded with Eric Clapton, and earned the title of premier post-war Chicago blues pianist. Then he died of liver cancer in 1970 and lay for nearly thirty years in an unmarked grave at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. This episode reconstructs his life from contradictory sources, beginning with a birth that some references place in Jackson, Mississippi in 1930 and census researchers place in Belzoni in 1924. Raised in a musical dynasty with a piano-playing father, a guitarist mother who worked with Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, a preacher-musician stepfather and lessons from Little Brother Montgomery by age seven, Spann was gigging in bands around Jackson by fourteen.

After moving to Chicago in 1946, Spann came up under Big Maceo Merriweather and forged a heavy, percussive a ...