Hambone Willie Newburn helped invent a piece of the DNA of American music and left behind exactly six recordings. Born around 1901 in Haywood County, Tennessee, near Brownsville on State Route 19, he played guitar, mandolin and sang at country dances and house parties before traveling to Atlanta in 1929 to cut six sides for OKeh Records. One of them was among the earliest known versions of Rollin' and Tumblin', a blues standard later carried forward by Muddy Waters, Cream and generations of rock musicians.

This episode reconstructs a country blues phantom whose biography survives almost entirely through peers like Sleepy John Estes and Yank Rachell. We examine the race-records era that brought portable recording to the South, the driving open-tuned slide riff and AAB lyrical structure that made his song so adaptable, and the decades-old rum ...