William Samuel McTier, known to history as Blind Willie McTell, read and wrote musical arrangements in Braille, played a booming 12-string guitar to cut through the noise of Atlanta's streets, and recorded under a rotating cast of aliases to outsmart the labels that exploited him. In this deep dive we trace his life from the Happy Valley community outside Thomson, Georgia, where he was born in 1898 or 1903 into a musical family that included gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey as a cousin, through schools for the blind in Georgia, New York and Michigan that gave him a formal theoretical education almost no bluesman of his generation possessed.

We follow his transformation into a traveling songster after his father left and his mother died, his mastery of the fluid, syncopated Piedmont style alongside slide guitar, ragtime, gospel and hokum, and ...