No photograph of her exists. Only six songs survive, on fewer than ten known original copies. Yet Geeshie Wiley's 1930 recording "Last Kind Words Blues" has been covered by a classical string quartet, featured in a major documentary, and recorded by rock legends. This episode treats her life as a historical cold case, separating decades of rumor from the startling facts uncovered by researchers.

We travel with Wiley and her partner L.V. Thomas from Houston to Grafton, Wisconsin, where a chair-manufacturing company ran Paramount Records, and explain why her looping, unresolved guitar tuning captures the moment older Black folk music was becoming the blues. We then follow Mack McCormick's door-to-door 1961 search for Thomas, the genealogical digging by John Jeremiah Sullivan and Caitlin Love that produced a real name and birthdate, and the sh ...