Walter Brown "Brownie" McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915 and raised in Kingsport, where a bout of polio at around age four left him unable to walk. His brother Granville earned the nickname "Stick" by pushing him along the dirt roads in a cart, and later wrote the rhythm and blues hit "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee." Their father George, a factory worker, sang and played guitar around University Avenue, and with no money for an instrument, an uncle built Brownie a guitar from a wooden board and a tin marshmallow box. From that stationary childhood he built a huge musical vocabulary, adding piano, ukulele, and five-string banjo and singing harmonies with the Golden Voices Gospel Quartet, until a surgery funded by the March of Dimes finally enabled him to walk.

This episode traces his path from the Rabbit Foot Minstrels tent show ...