Millions of people have chanted his first name in arenas and worn it on t-shirts for decades, yet almost nobody knows who Floyd Council was. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on September 2, 1911, to Harry and Lizzie Council, he grew up in the Piedmont region, a crossroads of tobacco farms, textile mills, and railroads where church hymns, minstrel shows, string bands, and ragtime piano collided into the Piedmont blues. Council mastered that intensely demanding style on guitar and mandolin, his thumb driving a steady bass line while his fingers picked out syncopated melodies, and in the 1920s he took to the streets with a group called the Chapel Hillbillies.

This episode follows his partnership with Blind Boy Fuller, the mid-1930s sessions for the American Record Corporation where he was credited as Dipper Boy Council and marketed as The Devil’s Daddy-in-Law, and the frustrating fact that no records exist featuring his work alone. It examines the stroke in the late 1960s that partially paralyzed his throat and slowed his hands while leaving his mind sharp, the 1970 visit from folklorist Peter B. Lowry that yielded no music, and the strange twist by which Syd Barrett, reading Paul Oliver’s liner notes on a 1962 Blind Boy Fuller album, fused the names Pink Anderson and Floyd Council into Pink Floyd.

• Why busking on 1920s Piedmont streets was a brutal meritocracy that shaped the loud, rhythmic character of the music
• How the race records business treated musicians as products, and why sensational devil-themed nicknames were marketing hooks rather than signs of status
• Council’s own 1969 account of recording 27 songs, only seven of them backing Fuller, and the six surviving tracks on the Carolina Blues compilation, including Working Man Blues and I’m Grieving and I’m Worrying
• What is lost when a stroke silences a master of an orally transmitted tradition
• His death in Sanford, North Carolina, on May 9, 1976, at age 64, and the 2014 headstone placed by the Killer Blues Headstone Project on his long-unmarked grave