In 1977, Alan Lomax fought to put a Bulgarian shepherdess, blind blues guitarists, and Navajo chants on the Voyager Golden Record alongside Western classical music, while back on Earth the FBI had been tracking him for decades as a suspected subversive. This episode follows the frail, asthmatic child born in Austin, Texas in 1915 who collected race records as a teenager in the Jim Crow South, entered Harvard at 16 on financial aid, was arrested at a protest defending a labor organizer, and dropped out at 17 to haul hundreds of pounds of disc-cutting equipment down back roads in a Plymouth sedan with his father for the Library of Congress.

We cover his 1941 trip to Mississippi to find Robert Johnson, which instead produced the first recordings of a farm worker named Muddy Waters, his racially integrated CBS radio show that was canceled after ...