Big Maceo Merriweather’s debut record, Worried Life Blues, was chosen for the inaugural class of the Blues Hall of Fame alongside Sweet Home Chicago and Hellhound on My Trail, and Eric Clapton regularly covers it in concert. Yet the man who recorded it lay in an unmarked grave in Warren, Michigan, for 55 years. This episode traces how a self-taught pianist born Major Merriweather in Newnan, Georgia, in March 1905 fused the smooth blues of Leroy Carr with the driving boogie-woogie of Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons to create a new dialect of blues piano.

We follow his path through the Great Migration to Detroit, where a decade of unamplified rent parties forged his thunderous left hand, and on to Chicago in 1941, where Tampa Red introduced him to Lester Melrose and a Bluebird Records contract. The episode covers the classics that followed, his mentorship of Henry Gray and Little Johnny Jones, the 1946 stroke that took away his right hand, his death in 1953 at age 47, and the 2008 benefit festival organized by Killer Blues that finally placed a headstone on his grave.

• How Worried Life Blues modernized Sleepy John Estes’s Someday Baby with a heavy left hand and smoky vocal delivery
• Why Tampa Red’s Chicago house functioned as the unofficial headquarters for arriving blues musicians, and why Lester Melrose controlled the pipeline to RCA Victor and Bluebird
• Tracks like Chicago Breakdown, Texas Stomp, and Detroit Jump, and how his rolling bass lines foreshadowed the electric bass in rock and roll
• The flat-fee business model that left him with no royalties even as RCA reissued his work in the 1975 double album Chicago Breakdown
• Steve Salter, the White Lake Blues Festival in Whitehall, Michigan, and his 2002 induction into the Blues Hall of Fame as an artist