R.L. Burnside was born in 1926 in Lafayette County, Mississippi, on ground now submerged beneath Sardis Lake, and grew up absorbing church singing, fife and drum picnics and the playing of his neighbor Mississippi Fred McDowell. This episode traces a life of staggering loss and survival: the Chicago year in which his father, two brothers and two uncles were all murdered, the murder conviction that sent him to Parchman Farm, and the plantation owner who got him released after six months because he needed a tractor driver. For nearly half a century he farmed cotton and soybeans, drove trucks and sold fish door to door, playing juke joints and house parties only on the side.

We follow the sparse recordings by folklorists George Mitchell in 1967 and David Evans in 1979, the 1990 documentary Deep Blues, and his 1991 signing with Fat Possum Recor ...