William Christopher Handy grew up in Florence, Alabama, in a log cabin built by his grandfather, the son of a pastor who believed a guitar was a tool of the devil. When young Handy saved his pennies from picking berries and making lye soap to buy one, his father made him exchange it for a dictionary. This episode explains how that suppression turned him into an elite listener who heard music in whippoorwills, the water of Cypress Creek and the polyrhythms of a shovel brigade at the McNabb furnace, and how a formally trained cornetist came to be called the father of a genre he never claimed to invent.

We follow his two Mississippi Delta epiphanies around 1903 to 1905: a man at the Tutwiler train station sliding a knife along guitar strings, and Prince McCoy's ragged trio electrifying a Cleveland dance hall while Handy's polished band stood a ...