In 1950 an ethnomusicologist recording the Kipsigis people in Kenya's Great Rift Valley captured a song about a mythical figure who turned out to be a Mississippi railroad worker: Jimmie Rodgers. This episode traces how a boy born in 1897, most likely in Meridian, lost his mother at six, bounced between relatives, ran away with a medicine show at 13, and got his real musical education as a water boy on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad absorbing the work songs of Black track crews.

The hosts follow his 1924 tuberculosis diagnosis, the move to Asheville, the 1927 Bristol sessions where the Tenneva Ramblers deserted him and Ralph Peer recorded him solo, and the Camden session where his blue yodel fused 3/4 vocal acrobatics with a 4/4 blues beat on T for Texas. They cover his sister-in-law Elsie McWilliams's role in writing and sanitizing his mater ...