In the 1990s, a gold-plated, steel-bodied tricone resonator guitar turned up in an Illinois pawn shop and was later sold to a Seattle music museum for $85,000. Its original owner had died in obscurity after the instrument was stolen from him while he lived in poverty on Chicago's South Side. That owner was Tampa Red, born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia, around the turn of the century, orphaned as a young child, and raised in Tampa by his grandmother and aunt under the name Hudson Whittaker. He learned by watching his older brother Eddie, picked up techniques from a street performer called Piccolo Pete, and studied the records of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Mamie Smith, developing a bottleneck slide technique that made the guitar weep and sing like a human voice.

This episode follows his 1925 move to Chicago during the Great Migra ...