Josh White was the first African-American male to become a national sex symbol, the first in his genre to sell a million records, the first to tour segregated venues with a white female co-star, and the first to give a command performance at the White House. Yet for many today he is a ghost in the pop culture machine, his fame nearly erased by Cold War politics. This episode follows his life from Greenville, South Carolina, where at age seven he watched his father beaten into permanent brain damage by local authorities, into years as a barefoot lead boy guiding blind street musicians like Blind Blake and Blind Joe Taggart through the Jim Crow South.

We trace how he reverse-engineered Piedmont blues by watching the hands of the masters he guided, how Paramount’s Mayo Williams discovered him in Chicago in 1927, and why his first purchase with his own earnings was a pair of shoes. We cover his dual identities as The Singing Christian and Pinewood Tom, a 1936 bar fight that paralyzed his fretting hand, and the rubber-ball willpower that brought it back. Then comes Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, the million-selling One Meatball, a dangerous Southern tour with Libby Holman, a 1941 White House performance where he told FDR a protest song was indeed about him, and the 1950 Red Channels listing and HUAC testimony that left him abandoned by the left and blacklisted by the right.

• How velvet shirts and direct eye contact shattered the sharecropper stereotype white audiences expected
• His friendship with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and his reported influence on early efforts to desegregate the armed forces
• What White actually said before HUAC, including reading an anti-lynching song into the congressional record
• Exile in London, the first published blues guitar instruction book in 1956, and JFK breaking the TV blacklist in 1963
• Co-designing the round-bodied Ovation guitar and improvising acrylic fingernails with what became superglue before his death in 1969