What kind of band writes a song that Frank Sinatra, Howlin' Wolf, the Grateful Dead, Bob Wills, Cream and Jack White could all cover? The answer is the Mississippi Sheiks, a 1930s guitar and fiddle group from Bolton, Mississippi, built around the Chatmon family. This episode starts with patriarch Henderson Chatmon, who lived during slavery and earned the distinction of a "musicianer," someone who could sight-read sheet music, and passed that formal literacy to his children as a portable trade. Brothers Lonnie and Sam Chatmon, collaborator Walter Vinson, and brother Armenter Chatmon, who ran a parallel solo career as the risque star Bo Carter, formed a group that could play waltzes, Tin Pan Alley pop, ragtime and jazz, a human jukebox that the industry's race-records marketing boxed into the label country blues.

In 1930 they recorded Sitting ...