Henry “Mule” Townsend was born in October 1909 in Shelby, Mississippi, to a father who played guitar and accordion. After the family moved near Cairo, Illinois, and the home turned abusive, nine-year-old Henry ran away and hoboed alone to St. Louis, where he took guitar lessons from a local figure named Dudlow Joe and paid his way as an auto mechanic, shoe shiner, hotel manager, and salesman. That forced self-reliance and the noisy, piano-driven urban scene shaped a sturdy, rhythmic guitar style and earned him a nickname that in the 1920s signaled a robust build and a resilient character. By the late 1920s he was touring and recording with pianist Walter Davis, working with J.D. Short, learning piano himself, and in 1929 cutting his first session for Columbia Records in Chicago.

This episode traces a professional career that ran for nine consecutive decades. It covers the 35 recordings he played on in 1935 alone and why a first-take player was a financial asset in the era of cutting direct to wax, his World War II service in the Army Air Forces, the postwar shift that pushed acoustic St. Louis blues out of the American market, and the European concert halls that received him with scholarly reverence. It explores his role as a living archive, from Paul Oliver’s 1960 interviews that anchored a Blues Hall of Fame book to Bill Greensmith’s 30 hours of tape that became his 1999 autobiography, along with his 1985 National Heritage Fellowship, his Blues Hall of Fame induction, and his 2006 Grammy. It closes on September 24, 2006, when the 96-year-old received the first key to the Paramount Plaza Walk of Fame in Grafton, Wisconsin, and died hours later, followed by burial with military honors at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery and a second Grammy accepted by his son Alonzo in 2008.

• How a runaway nine-year-old’s survival instincts became the foundation of a self-made music career
• Why the mechanical rhythms of shoe shining and auto repair may have bled into the St. Louis guitar style
• Why reliability on the first take mattered so much when studios recorded directly to master discs
• Why postwar European audiences treated blues as serious folk art while the U.S. market moved on
• How Townsend kept writing new songs into his 70s and 80s rather than treating his catalog as a museum piece