Big Maceo Merriweather's debut record, Worried Life Blues, was chosen for the inaugural class of the Blues Hall of Fame alongside Sweet Home Chicago and Hellhound on My Trail, and Eric Clapton regularly covers it in concert. Yet the man who recorded it lay in an unmarked grave in Warren, Michigan, for 55 years. This episode traces how a self-taught pianist born Major Merriweather in Newnan, Georgia, in March 1905 fused the smooth blues of Leroy Carr with the driving boogie-woogie of Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons to create a new dialect of blues piano.

We follow his path through the Great Migration to Detroit, where a decade of unamplified rent parties forged his thunderous left hand, and on to Chicago in 1941, where Tampa Red introduced him to Lester Melrose and a Bluebird Records contract. The episode covers the classics that followed, ...