In 2023, a 74-year-old blues legend walked across a stage in Colorado to receive the high school diploma his school denied him 57 years earlier for refusing to cut his hair. That refusal to compromise defines the life of Otis Taylor, born in Chicago in 1948 and raised in Denver, who first fell for the banjo before learning its African origins had been twisted through blackface minstrelsy and absorbed into white bluegrass. He dropped the instrument on principle, switched to guitar and harmonica, toured the US and Europe with bands like Zephyr, and then in 1977 walked away from music entirely to spend 18 years as an antique dealer.

His 1995 return produced more than 14 albums and a subgenre he pioneered called trance blues, built on hypnotic repetition and single droning chords with lyrics confronting poverty, murder, and racism. Downbeat nam ...