Gus Cannon was born in Red Banks, Mississippi, around 1883, though his tombstone claims 1874, a discrepancy that reflects how little documentation existed for Black Americans born in the rural South after the Civil War. Raised alongside nine brothers who played fiddle, guitar, and banjo, he was sent 100 miles away at age 12 to sharecrop cotton in Clarksdale with his brother Tom. Unable to afford an instrument, he built his first banjo from a frying pan and a raccoon skin and taught himself downpicking on the tune “Old John Booker.” At 15, with $10 from his brother, he set off to entertain workers at sawmills, levee construction sites, and railroad camps across the Delta, soaking up lessons from fiddler Jim Turner of W.C. Handy’s band and from guitarist Alec Lee, who showed him how to play slide with a pocket knife.

This episode follows Cannon to Memphis around 1907, through medicine show tours that lasted until 1930, and into the jug band boom of Beale Street, where he met harmonica player Noah Lewis and guitarist Ashley Thompson. It covers his 1927 Paramount recordings backed by Blind Blake, the January 1928 Victor session that launched Cannon’s Jug Stompers, and the 34 tracks he cut between 1927 and 1930, including “Minglewood Blues” and the original “Walk Right In.” It explains why the Great Depression ended his recording career, how he mentored a young Johnny Cash in Memphis in 1954, and how, in the early 1960s, he pawned his banjo to pay a heating bill just as the Rooftop Singers took “Walk Right In” to number one. It closes with the royalties that rescued him, his 1963 Stax Records album at age 80 with old rival Will Shade on jug and Milton Roby on washboard, and his death in Memphis on October 15, 1979, at 96.

• How a frying pan and raccoon skin became a working banjo, and what that says about resourcefulness in the Jim Crow South
• Why adapting knife slide technique to the quick-decaying banjo required unusual creativity and control
• How the jug filled the bass role for street musicians who could not afford or carry a stand-up bass
• What separates downpicking from the three-finger classic banjo style that turned Cannon into a one-man orchestra
• How the 1960s folk revival dug up 1920s 78s and pulled a forgotten songwriter back into the spotlight