An American slide guitar master who worked with Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and released more than 50 albums spent his last three decades in Hanover, Germany. Born Iverson Minter in March 1932 in Bessemer, Alabama, he lost his mother to pneumonia soon after birth and his father to a Ku Klux Klan lynching in 1937, passed through an orphanage and relatives in Pittsburgh, and lied about his age at 16 to join the Army, where he first played the blues in service clubs in Korea.

This episode follows his 1960s New York recordings, the charting single I'm Too Poor to Die, the loss of his wife Elyse to cancer in 1973, his marriage to folk singer Odetta, and the flat-fee label economics that kept him broke despite constant work. We then look at the 1983 separation and move to Germany, his marriage to Dora who became his manager, the 1994 collabo ...