Etta Baker said her musical inspiration came to her in dreams, and she kept a relationship with the guitar for nearly 90 years, starting at age three. Born Etta Lucille Reed in Caldwell County, North Carolina in 1913, she learned entirely by ear from her father Boone Reed, mastering the six-string guitar, the 12-string guitar and the five-string banjo. This deep dive explains what makes Piedmont blues distinct from Delta blues, essentially ragtime piano transposed to the guitar with a driving thumb bass line and syncopated fingerpicked melody, and how that music served as the release valve for a family working a Virginia tobacco farm.

We follow the chance 1956 encounter at the Cone Mansion in Blowing Rock where folk collector Paul Clayton recorded five solo pieces for Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, for which Etta was never paid. We look at the devastating year of 1967, when she lost her husband Lee Baker and a son killed in Vietnam and stopped playing entirely, and her late-life renaissance with the Music Maker Relief Foundation, which helped her reclaim the rights to those recordings, followed by albums, awards and rock stars coming to her kitchen in Morganton.

• How Piedmont blues works mechanically and why it demands intense finger independence
• Learning by immersion in a household of eight children where everyone played an instrument
• One Dime Blues, Paul Clayton’s tape recorder, and the exploitation baked into mid-century folk collecting
• Grief, silence, and the consolation that brought her back to the guitar
• Reclaiming her copyrights, One Dime Blues (1991), Railroad Bill (1999), Taj Mahal, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, the NEA Heritage Fellowship, and her passing at 93 in 2006