In 1973, millions of viewers watched Redd Foxx sing and dance to Shake That Thing on Sanford and Son. Almost none of them knew that the man who wrote it, and who essentially invented the solo singer-songwriter format in recorded music, was lying in an unmarked grave in a Chicago cemetery. William Henry Jackson, better known as Papa Charlie Jackson, was born in New Orleans in November 1887, a date known only from a later draft card. He cut his teeth in traveling minstrel and medicine shows, learning to hold a distracted crowd standing in the dirt, and became a formidable multi-instrumentalist on guitar, ukulele, and especially the piercing banjo guitar.

This episode follows Jackson to Chicago's chaotic Maxwell Street Market, where busking over the din forged the booming voice and percussive attack that let him do what no one had done before: ...