Drop the needle on a 1929 Sleepy John Estes record and the weathered, sobbing voice sounds like a man at the end of his life. Early-1960s blues historians assumed he had died decades earlier, and Big Bill Broonzy had even written that he was dead. But in 1962 Bob Koester and Samuel Charters followed the geographic clues in his lyrics to Brownsville, Tennessee, and found him alive, completely blind, and living in a dilapidated shack. This episode traces the life, disappearance, and improbable second act of a Tennessee sharecropper whose hyper-local songwriting quietly became foundational DNA for the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Dylan.

Born in Ripley, Tennessee, in 1899 or 1900 into the debt trap of sharecropping, Estes lost the sight in his right eye to a thrown rock as a young man and turned to fish fries, picnics, and medicine shows for  ...