Harding “Hop” Wilson was born in Grapeland, Texas in April 1921, earned his nickname from playing harmonica so incessantly that “Harp” slurred into “Hop,” and as a teenager picked up the steel guitar that would define his legacy. This episode explores how a young Black musician in the segregated 1930s South absorbed two separate worlds, the raw acoustic Texas blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson and the loud, amplified steel guitar of white western swing dance halls, through borderless radio waves, and fused them into something new. After Army service in the Second World War era he settled in Houston, formed a 1950s trio with drummer Ivory Lee Semien and bassist “Ice Water” Jones, and by 1957 was recording for Goldband Records in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Wilson played a twin-neck lap steel guitar, and he played it low, heavy and morose, dragging listeners into the muddy registers rather than the weeping high slides of country steel. The hosts use his bleak holiday recording Merry Christmas, Darling to explain how an instrument laid flat against the chest becomes a physical feedback loop for a heavy worldview. In 1960 he signed with Houston’s Ivory Records, but he despised touring and stayed planted in local Third Ward clubs until his death in August 1975 at age 54. The episode reframes that choice against the dangers and exploitation of the Chitlin Circuit, then follows his records across the Atlantic via Houston’s shipping lanes to British record shops, where Ron Wood cited his licks as the foundation for the Rolling Stones’ Black Limousine and Fleetwood Mac founder Peter Green championed his twin-neck mastery. His song My Woman Has a Black Cat Bone became a blues standard, covered in 1985 by Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland and Robert Cray on Showdown with a spoken tribute to the man himself.

• How the nickname “Hop” evolved from “Harp” and how radio let a Texas teenager blend blues and western swing
• The mechanics of the twin-neck lap steel and why Wilson’s low, brooding tone sounded like nobody else
• Why refusing to tour was a choice for safety and autonomy, not artistic self-sabotage
• How Houston port sailors carried his Ivory Records pressings to the ears of Ron Wood and Peter Green
• The afterlife of My Woman Has a Black Cat Bone, from the 1985 Showdown cover to modern blues acts worldwide