Lightnin’ Hopkins recorded more albums than almost anyone in his genre, played Carnegie Hall, toured Japan and backed a psychedelic rock band, yet for the first half of his career he stubbornly refused to leave one street in Houston. This episode traces Samuel John Hopkins from his 1912 birth in Centerville, Texas, and a 1920 church picnic in Buffalo, Texas where the fiercely protective Blind Lemon Jefferson let an eight-year-old accompany him, through a mid-1930s stretch on the Houston County Prison Farm and a failed first run at Houston with his cousin Texas Alexander.

We break down how solitary years on rural porches forged his one-man-band technique, with thumb bass, strummed rhythm, single-note leads and percussive slaps on the guitar body all running at once, and why his 11-bar and 13-and-a-half-bar blues made him incompatible with standard bands. Then come Dowling Street in 1946, talent scout Lola Anne Cullum, the Aladdin Records session in Los Angeles where an executive dubbed him Lightnin’ and pianist Wilson Smith Thunder, regional hits like T-Model Blues and Tim Moore’s Farm for Gold Star, and a decade ruling Third Ward clubs. We follow Mack McCormick’s 1959 discovery, the October 1960 Carnegie Hall debut with Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, Mojo Hand, the 1968 album Free Form Patterns with the 13th Floor Elevators, a 1978 Japan tour, and his 1982 death at 69.

• Why staying local through the Jim Crow era was self-preservation and autonomy rather than a lack of ambition
• How the folk revival and psychedelic rockers both embraced the same free-form, rule-breaking phrasing
• Improvised talking blues about segregation, bad luck and the party scene, delivered with biting humor
• Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Rude Mood as a homage to Hopkins’ Sky Hop, and guitars enshrined at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Museum of African American History and Culture
• One of the first inductees into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, a statue in Crockett, Texas, and 35 years as Houston’s unofficial poet in residence