Millions of people have chanted his first name in arenas and worn it on t-shirts for decades, yet almost nobody knows who Floyd Council was. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on September 2, 1911, to Harry and Lizzie Council, he grew up in the Piedmont region, a crossroads of tobacco farms, textile mills, and railroads where church hymns, minstrel shows, string bands, and ragtime piano collided into the Piedmont blues. Council mastered that intensely demanding style on guitar and mandolin, his thumb driving a steady bass line while his fingers picked out syncopated melodies, and in the 1920s he took to the streets with a group called the Chapel Hillbillies.

This episode follows his partnership with Blind Boy Fuller, the mid-1930s sessions for the American Record Corporation where he was credited as Dipper Boy Council and marketed as The  ...