Chris Thomas King played the soul-selling bluesman on screen, and then wrote a book arguing that the crossroads legend and the Mississippi Delta origin story are wrong. Born Derwood Christopher Thomas in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1962, he was the son of traditional blues musician Tabby Thomas, who ran a famous local club. Rather than preserve his father's music in amber, he dragged it into the hip-hop era with the 1994 RCA album 21st Century Blues From the Hood, described as the first sample-based, all-rap-and-blues concept album, and made the then-unheard-of move of taking control of his master recordings, founding 21st Century Blues Records and the publishing company Young Blues Rebel.

This episode explores the central paradox of his career: a modernizer who became famous playing Tommy Johnson in the Coen Brothers' 2000 film O Brother, W ...