Born in Mobile, Alabama in April 1867, just two years after the Civil War ended, Johnny Watson was still recording in 1960, the year the Beatles were forming. Known as Daddy Stovepipe for the tall hat that made him instantly recognizable on Chicago's Maxwell Street, he may be the earliest-born blues performer ever captured on record. This deep dive follows a musical chameleon who played 12-string guitar in Mexican mariachi bands before 1900, toured the South with the Rabbit's Foot Minstrels, and by the 1920s was a one-man band holding crowds in a chaotic open-air market with nothing but his lungs and his guitar.

The episode covers his 1924 recording of Sundown Blues in Richmond, Indiana, his 1927 Gennett sessions in Birmingham as half of Sunny Jim and Whistlin' Joe, and the aliases like Reverend Alfred Pitts and Jimmy Watson that let him wo ...