In the early 1960s an elderly Gus Cannon pawned his banjo to pay a heating bill. Months later the Rooftop Singers took his song Walk Right In to number one, and he bought the banjo back. This episode traces the full arc behind that reversal, beginning on the Henderson Newell plantation in Red Banks, Mississippi, where records list his birth as 1883 while his tombstone says 1874. Sharecropping in Clarksdale at 12, he built his first banjo from a frying pan and a raccoon skin, taught himself a percussive downpicking style, and learned from fiddler Jim Turner and guitarist Alec Lee, whose pocket-knife slide technique Cannon adapted to the banjo.

We follow him to Memphis around 1907, through years of medicine shows and minstrel circuits, to his 1927 Paramount session as Banjo Joe with Blind Blake, and to January 1928, when Victor Records record ...