Half a million people at Woodstock in 1969 swayed to Canned Heat’s Going Up the Country without knowing its bouncing melody and distinctive solo came from a man born to freed slaves in Texas nearly a century earlier. This episode pieces together the fragmented life of Henry Thomas, billed in his day as Ragtime Texas. Born in 1874 in Big Sandy, Texas, Thomas rejected sharecropping as a teenager, hopped freight trains and earned his living as an itinerant songster, a one-man vaudeville act who had to play whatever a crowd demanded: minstrel songs, gospel, dance reels, ragtime and the earliest iterations of the blues. The railroads were the cultural arteries of the era, and Thomas cross-pollinated regional sounds across the American South.

We break down his unique technique, a guitar style derived from banjo picking paired with the quills, a set of cane pan pipes mounted on a rack around his neck. Between 1927 and 1929, already in his mid-fifties, Thomas recorded 24 sides for Vocalion Records in Chicago, 23 of them released, including Cotton Field Blues, John Henry and Bull Doze Blues, and then vanished from the historical record. Most historians estimate he died around 1930, despite an unverified 1949 sighting in Houston reported by researcher Mack McCormick. His music sat dormant for decades until Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music put two of his songs in front of a new generation, sparking a resurrection that ran through Bob Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Taj Mahal, the Grateful Dead and, eventually, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

• What a songster actually was, and why survival depended on reading a room of railway workers or townspeople
• How banjo muscle memory turned the guitar into a rhythm engine, and how the quills echo African wind instruments and the Andean pan flute
• Why Thomas’s pre-genre repertoire predates the race records and hillbilly records categories of the 1920s
• Dylan crediting Thomas as co-writer on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and Canned Heat rebuilding Bull Doze Blues into Going Up the Country
• The Grateful Dead’s first single Don’t Ease Me In, plus covers and tributes from the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Charley Crockett