Frankie Lee Sims claimed a birthday that never existed, February 29, 1906, but the real story of this Texas bluesman is stranger and richer than any fabricated calendar date. Born in New Orleans in 1917 to two guitar-playing parents, with Texas Alexander as an uncle and Lightnin’ Hopkins as a cousin, Sims learned from Little Hat Jones in Marshall, Texas, then ran away from home at 12 to work as a traveling musician. By the late 1930s he was living a double life in Palestine, Texas: a respectable schoolteacher during the week and a hard-driving juke joint guitarist on weekends.

This episode traces how three years in the Marine Corps during World War II pushed Sims to abandon teaching and settle in Dallas, where crowded Deep Ellum clubs forced him to go electric alongside T-Bone Walker and Smokey Hogg. We dig into his 1953 regional hit Lucy Mae Blues for Specialty Records, his 1957 Ace Records sessions with saxophone and piano that edged toward rock and roll, and his influence on T-Bone Walker, King Curtis and Albert Collins. We also examine why the 1960s folk-blues revival embraced his acoustic cousin while shutting out the electric innovator, and how a late rediscovery by Chris Strachwitz came too late before his death in 1970 at age 53.

• How a 12-year-old runaway may have invented a fake birth year to survive adult venues in the Jim Crow South
• The schoolteacher-by-day, juke-joint-guitarist-by-weekend years in Palestine, Texas
• Why Dallas club volume turned acoustic country blues into electric Texas blues
• Lucy Mae Blues, Walking with Frankie and the rhythm-first guitar style compared to a DJ tweaking a loop
• The Arhoolie rediscovery, posthumous compilations and the unissued 1960 Bobby Robinson sessions