The chugging train rhythm of Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues feels like it was pulled straight out of the American soil, but its musical backbone traces to a piano instrumental by Little Brother Montgomery, an African-American and Creek Indian blues musician born in 1906 in the sawmill town of Kentwood, Louisiana. Montgomery started playing piano at four, largely teaching himself while Jelly Roll Morton casually visited the family home. At 11 he left home and spent four years surviving as a solo pianist in barrelhouses and lumber and turpentine camps across Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, where the only way to be heard over a room of exhausted workers was to turn the piano into a percussion instrument with a relentless left hand.

This episode follows him from those camps into jazz ensembles with Clarence Desdunes and Buddy Petit, to  ...