Cornelius Green III was born in 1928 on the Dugas plantation near Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and spent his early adult years in punishing manual labor: a casino porter in Jefferson Parish, a rice mill hand, a construction hauler, a truck driver, and finally a shift worker at a Gulf oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. Music was his release valve. After guitar lessons from a cousin and a fixation on John Lee Hooker’s Boogie Chillen and the melancholy of Muddy Waters, he was jamming at the Blue Moon Club in Lake Charles in 1955 when Clifton Chenier invited him to join the Zydeco Ramblers as second guitarist. The tour took him to Chicago and Los Angeles, where he fell asleep in the middle of an audition for producer Bumps Blackwell, losing his shot at a major deal and inspiring Chenier’s song The Cat’s Dream.

That botched audition turned out to be the reset that made him a solo artist. He married, moved to Opelousas, started writing original material, and took a demo tape to J.D. Miller in Crowley, who leased his debut single to Excello Records in 1956 and gave him the stage name Lonesome Sundown. This episode digs into the mechanics of swamp blues, from playing slightly behind the beat to the tape delay and reverb of Miller’s studio, and follows Green through eight years of respected records, a mid-1960s collapse driven by shifting tastes and a painful divorce, his retreat into the church and the ministry, a 1977 comeback album, and his final decision to leave the music business for good.

• How refinery shifts, rice mills, and construction work shaped the exhausted, dragging feel of his music
• The Los Angeles audition nap that cost him a contract and pushed him toward writing his own songs
• J.D. Miller’s Crowley studio, the name Lonesome Sundown, and tracks like My Home Is a Prison and I’m a Mojo Man
• Why he abandoned the industry in 1965 for manual labor and the Apostolic Faith church, eventually rising to minister
• The Been Gone Too Long comeback produced by Bruce Bromberg and Dennis Walker, the 1979 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, tours of Sweden and Japan with Phillip Walker, a 1994 stroke, his death in April 1995 at 66, and a posthumous Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame induction in 2000