His music shaped the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and rock and roll itself, yet his birth date is disputed across census and draft records, his death is wrapped in rumors of poisoned coffee, a dog attack, and a Chicago snowstorm, and his grave sat unmarked for nearly 70 years. This episode reconstructs the life of Blind Lemon Jefferson, the blind son of Texas sharecroppers who became the father of the Texas blues.

We follow his eight-hour nightly shifts playing street corners for bootleggers and gamblers, his gospel singing in Buffalo, Texas, and his move around 1912 to Dallas’ Deep Ellum district, where a teenage T-Bone Walker guided him from corner to corner in exchange for guitar lessons. We trace how talent scout Mayo Williams brought him to Paramount Records in Chicago, why executives first hid him behind the gospel pseudonym Deacon L.J. Bates, and how “Got the Blues” and “Long Lonesome Blues” sold in unprecedented six-figure numbers, funding a chauffeur-driven Ford before his death in Chicago on December 19, 1929 at age 36.

• The thumb-as-rhythm-section finger-picking technique that made him a one-man band
• How segregation compressed Black talent into Deep Ellum and turned it into an incubator
• Why the record industry believed a solo male guitarist could not sell in the era of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith
• The robbery and snowstorm theories behind a death certificate that reads probable acute myocarditis
• “Matchbox Blues” from Carl Perkins to the Beatles, Dylan’s debut-album cover, and the Fallout: New Vegas homage