He was born John Len Chapman in Memphis in 1915, signed his contracts as Peter Chapman, and stepped onto stages from Chicago to Paris as Memphis Slim. This episode explores how one pianist used a maze of legal and stage identities to survive the most exploitative eras of the music business, from the loud, unamplified honky-tonks and gambling joints of West Memphis and the Missouri bootheel in the 1930s to his 1939 arrival in Chicago, where he replaced the late Joshua Altheimer in Big Bill Broonzy’s band and became the go-to session pianist for Sonny Boy Williamson, Washboard Sam and Jazz Gillum.

We follow Bluebird producer Lester Melrose’s decision to brand him Memphis Slim, the post-war pivot to jump blues with the House Rockers across a dizzying string of independent labels, the 1948 number one R&B hit Messin’ Around, and the 1947 song Nobody Loves Me that became the universal standard Every Day I Have the Blues. We then trace his folk-revival partnership with Willie Dixon, his 1962 move to Paris, his French film and television work, his honors from the French Ministry of Culture and the U.S. Senate, and his 1988 death and burial back in Memphis.

• Why keeping his publishing under his father’s name Peter Chapman acted as a firewall for his intellectual property
• How wartime shellac shortages and major-label retreat pushed him into the chaotic world of Miracle, Premium and United Records
• The 1947 Alan Lomax session with Broonzy and Williamson that became Blues in the Mississippi Night
• How Lowell Fulson, B.B. King, Ray Charles and Joe Williams turned his song into a Grammy Hall of Fame standard
• Inductions into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1989 and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2015