Around 1900 in Mississippi, a three-year-old laid a guitar flat on the floorboards and crawled underneath it to figure out how the machine worked. That boy was Sam Chatmon, born in 1897 in Bolton, Mississippi, into a family string band with roots going back to slavery and possibly a half-brother of Delta blues father Charlie Patton. This episode follows a street-corner musician who survived obscurity and plantation labor to become a celebrated festival star half a century later.

The conversation covers the Chatmon family's work playing rags, ballads, waltzes, and dance hits for paying audiences, Sam's mastery of guitar, banjo, mandolin, and harmonica, and the 1930s recordings made alongside the Mississippi Sheiks, formed by his brothers Lonnie Chatmon and Bo Carter with Walter Vinson. It then explains why those records brought no financial  ...