Etta Baker said her musical inspiration came to her in dreams, and she kept a relationship with the guitar for nearly 90 years, starting at age three. Born Etta Lucille Reed in Caldwell County, North Carolina in 1913, she learned entirely by ear from her father Boone Reed, mastering the six-string guitar, the 12-string guitar and the five-string banjo. This deep dive explains what makes Piedmont blues distinct from Delta blues, essentially ragtime piano transposed to the guitar with a driving thumb bass line and syncopated fingerpicked melody, and how that music served as the release valve for a family working a Virginia tobacco farm.

We follow the chance 1956 encounter at the Cone Mansion in Blowing Rock where folk collector Paul Clayton recorded five solo pieces for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, for which Etta was never ...