On New Year's Eve 2006, viewers of Jools Holland's Hootenanny watched a heavily bearded man in a John Deere cap stomp a carpeted wooden box and tear into a distorted blues on a battered three-string guitar. The press hailed him as an authentic train-hopping hobo from the American South. A decade later, Matthew Wright's unauthorized 2016 biography Seasick Steve: Ramblin' Man revealed a very different story. Born Steven Gene Leach in Oakland, California in 1951, a full ten years younger than the press claimed, he fled an abusive stepfather at 13 after learning his first chords from K.C. Douglas, a mechanic at his grandfather's garage who had played with Tommy Johnson and written Mercury Blues. His teenage years unfolded not in Mississippi rail yards but in Haight-Ashbury, at the Monterey Pop Festival and around the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and J ...