Chris Smither's life shatters the expected bluesman origin story. Born in Miami in November 1944 to a father who was a professor of Spanish and Mexican culture and an uncle who was an award-winning musicologist, he lived in Ecuador, the Rio Grande Valley, New Orleans, and Paris, where his father brought him his first guitar from Spain. He won a New Orleans folk battle of the bands in 1960 and enrolled at the University of the Americas in Mexico City to study anthropology, until a friend played him Lightnin' Hopkins' Blues in My Bottle. After transferring to Tulane and discovering Mississippi John Hurt, he abandoned a junior year in Paris, returned to the United States in 1965, and knocked uninvited on Eric von Schmidt's door in Florida, which led him straight to Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This episode follows his early albums in 1 ...