In 1963, field researchers George Mitchell and Roger Brown asked around Shorter's Barbershop on Atlanta's Decatur Street for a blues pioneer who had vanished decades earlier. Ten men volunteered to lead the way to a weathered house where they found a 75-year-old double amputee in a wheelchair who had not recorded in 34 years. The moment he was handed a guitar, the decades evaporated. That man was Joshua Barnes Howell, better known as Peg Leg Howell, born on a farm in Eatonton, Georgia, on March 5, 1888, and a crucial link between loose 19th-century folk traditions and the structured 12-bar blues that became the bedrock of rock and roll.

This episode separates myth from reality in the legend that Howell taught himself guitar in a single night in 1909, then follows the 1916 shooting by his brother-in-law that cost him his right leg and his li ...