In late November 1941, one of the most popular blues musicians in America walked into a studio and recorded songs about mortality, including Bring Me Flowers While I'm Living. Less than a month later, on his 39th birthday, he died hours after the car he was riding in slammed into a parked freight train a block from his home. William Bunch was born in 1902, most likely in Ripley, Tennessee, though some contemporaries pointed to Cotton Plant, Arkansas, where he was eventually buried. By the late 1920s he was playing piano in the juke joints of East St. Louis, including one above a barbershop on West Biddle Street, and there he discarded his birth name to become Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law and the High Sheriff from Hell.

This episode traces that persona to the trickster figure of African-American folklore and the West African pra ...