Big Joe Williams did not just play the Delta blues; he engineered his own instrument to survive it. Born in Mississippi in 1903, he spent his early years busking in country stores, back alleys, local bars, and rowdy logging and levee camps, and toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in the early 1920s. To cut through the noise of those rooms he built a nine-string guitar with unison pairs on the first, second, and fourth strings, wired on a primitive electric pickup, and nailed a pie plate and a dangling beer can to his amplifier so the whole rig rattled and buzzed. The modifications doubled as an anti-theft device, since no other musician could figure out how to play the thing.

This episode follows Williams from the work camps to St. Louis, where producer Lester Melrose signed him to Bluebird Records in 1935 and he cut Baby, Please Don’t Go and Crawling King Snake, through his rediscovery by folk revivalists and his mentorship of a young Bob Dylan in the early 1960s. Along the way we unpack why he fired a teenage Muddy Waters, how his wife Bessie Mae Smith figured into his biggest song, and the legendary 1965 Greenwich Village set where a jaded crowd’s pity turned into a roaring ovation.

• How the nine-string guitar worked: three extra tuning pegs, open G tuning with a capo at the second fret, and thumb and index finger picks that let one man sound like two guitarists
• Why the buzz of a pie plate and beer can was a deliberate aesthetic choice rooted in African percussive traditions rather than a flaw
• The Muddy Waters story: why Williams dropped his 15-year-old harmonica sidekick from Rolling Fork, and what it reveals about the economics of busking
• Williams’s Spivey Records duets with Bob Dylan in 1962 and his advice to stop singing covers and write original songs
• His death in Macon, Mississippi, in 1982, the unmarked grave near Crawford, his 1992 Blues Hall of Fame induction, and the 1994 headstone campaign led by Dan Forte and Charlie Musselwhite that crowned him king of the nine-string guitar