On a hot Southern farm field in the early 20th century, a young boy pulled a harmonica from his pocket and played with such driving rhythm that the plow horses synced up and pulled harder. That boy was Saunders Terrell, born October 24, 1911, known to the world as Sonny Terry. By sixteen, two separate eye injuries had left him completely blind, erasing agricultural work as an option and turning a casual pastime into a matter of survival. This episode traces how devastating limitation forced a completely new vocabulary for the blues harmonica.

We follow Terry to the loud textile-town streets of Shelby, North Carolina, where he engineered a percussive, polyphonic style that translated ragtime-based Piedmont guitar to a diatonic harp, weaving whoops, hollers, and falsetto cries between breaths and imitating freight trains and fox hunts. His du ...