Fenton Robinson wrote and played the hidden DNA of the blues, then watched fate and the industry take the credit. Born in 1935 on a farm near Greenwood, Mississippi, he moved to Memphis in 1953, cut his first single Tennessee Woman in 1957, recorded the future standard As the Years Go Passing By in 1959, and played the defining guitar parts on Larry Davis’s original 1958 recording of Texas Flood as an uncredited session man. This episode explores the jazz-influenced phrasing, minor sevenths and dominant ninths that made his Chicago blues guitar style so distinctive after his 1962 move north.

We unpack the 1967 recording of Somebody Loan Me a Dime for the Palos label, the historic snowstorm that froze its nationwide distribution and killed its radio window, and the devastating year of 1969, when Boz Scaggs released a misattributed cover featuring Duane Allman while Robinson was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after a fatal car accident. We then follow his resilience: nine months in prison, a return to the club circuit and to teaching, his 1974 Alligator Records album reclaiming his signature song, a Grammy nomination for I Hear Some Blues Downstairs, and his 2023 induction into the Blues Hall of Fame.

• Why a one-week delay in 1960s vinyl distribution could permanently close a small label’s promotional window
• How session players were treated as day laborers with no claim to the arrangements they created
• The poetic placement of Somebody Loan Me a Dime in the parole scene of the 1980 film The Blues Brothers
• Why by the 1990s the song was in the repertoire of one out of every two working blues artists
• His 1997 death from brain cancer at 62 and the 2014 headstone placed at Booker Cemetery in Marks, Mississippi