Harding "Hop" Wilson was born in Grapeland, Texas in April 1921, earned his nickname from playing harmonica so incessantly that "Harp" slurred into "Hop," and as a teenager picked up the steel guitar that would define his legacy. This episode explores how a young Black musician in the segregated 1930s South absorbed two separate worlds, the raw acoustic Texas blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson and the loud, amplified steel guitar of white western swing dance halls, through borderless radio waves, and fused them into something new. After Army service in the Second World War era he settled in Houston, formed a 1950s trio with drummer Ivory Lee Semien and bassist "Ice Water" Jones, and by 1957 was recording for Goldband Records in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Wilson played a twin-neck lap steel guitar, and he played it low, heavy and morose, dragging  ...