Syd Barrett named Pink Floyd by mashing together two first names he spotted in the liner notes of a 1962 blues album: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The man whose record those notes were printed on was Fulton Allen, better known as Blind Boy Fuller, and his 36 years were a raw, unfiltered lesson in what it took to survive as a disabled, underprivileged Black man in the early 20th-century South. In this deep dive we begin in North Carolina around 1904, where Allen was born one of ten children, lost his mother young, married his wife Cora, and prepared for a life of manual labor until his eyesight began to fail in his teens. By 1928 he was completely blind.

We examine the medical neglect behind that blindness, from a Charlotte doctor’s absurd “snow blindness” diagnosis to the 1937 examination that revealed untreated neonatal conjunctivitis, and how losing his sight turned a boyhood guitar hobby into his only means of survival. Playing a steel National resonator guitar loud enough to cut through the roar of Durham’s tobacco warehouses, he studied Blind Blake records, learned from the Reverend Gary Davis, and forged what became known as the Durham sound with musicians like Floyd Council, harmonica player Sonny Terry and washboard player George Washington.

• How record store manager and talent scout James Baxter Long discovered him in 1935, rebranded him Blind Boy Fuller and took him to New York to record more than 120 tracks
• The cultural reach of his songs, from “Truckin’ My Blues Away” inspiring Robert Crumb’s “Keep on Truckin’” to a phrase the Rolling Stones borrowed for a live album title
• The 1938 shooting of his wife that sent him to prison and cost him a spot at John Hammond’s “From Spirituals to Swing” at Carnegie Hall, launching Sonny Terry’s career instead
• His physical decline, the 1940 surgery, and his death from blood poisoning on February 13, 1941 at age 36
• Columbia’s attempt to market Brownie McGhee as “Blind Boy Fuller No. 2,” and the unmarked grave in Durham’s Grove Hill Cemetery where he lies today