Fred McDowell was born on January 12, 1904, in Rossville, Tennessee, orphaned in his youth, and playing guitar for tips at local dances by age 14. He moved to Memphis in 1926 to work at the Buckeye Feed Mill, drifted back to Mississippi to pick cotton in 1928, and settled in Como around 1940, where he farmed full time for decades and played only on weekends for picnics and juke joint dances. In that isolation he perfected the North Mississippi Hill Country style, built on a single hypnotic droning chord rather than standard changes, and developed a slide technique that evolved from a pocket knife to a beef rib bone to a glass bottleneck worn on his ring finger so his other fingers stayed free to fret.

This episode follows what happened when folklorists Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins pulled up to his porch in 1959 on their Southern Journey f ...