Charley Patton stood about five feet five inches tall, yet his gravelly voice was reputed to carry the length of five football fields without a microphone, and he played guitar behind his head and behind his back decades before rock and roll existed. This episode reconstructs the slippery historical record of the man called the father of the Delta blues: a birth year most often given as April 1891 in Hinds County, Mississippi, but variously listed as 1881, 1885 and 1887; his upbringing by Bill and Annie Patton alongside persistent rumors that his biological father was Henderson Chatmon of the Mississippi Sheiks family; and a mixed Black, white and Native American heritage that exposed him to many musical traditions at once.

The conversation examines the Dockery Plantation in Sunflower County, a 10,000-acre cotton farm and sawmill where Patt ...