Fred McDowell was born on January 12, 1904, in Rossville, Tennessee, orphaned in his youth, and playing guitar for tips at local dances by age 14. He moved to Memphis in 1926 to work at the Buckeye Feed Mill, drifted back to Mississippi to pick cotton in 1928, and settled in Como around 1940, where he farmed full time for decades and played only on weekends for picnics and juke joint dances. In that isolation he perfected the North Mississippi Hill Country style, built on a single hypnotic droning chord rather than standard changes, and developed a slide technique that evolved from a pocket knife to a beef rib bone to a glass bottleneck worn on his ring finger so his other fingers stayed free to fret.

This episode follows what happened when folklorists Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins pulled up to his porch in 1959 on their Southern Journey field trip and recorded a 55-year-old farmer with a fully formed musical vocabulary. It covers his 1965 European tour with the American Folk Blues Festival alongside Big Mama Thornton and John Lee Hooker, his move to electric guitar and the defiantly titled 1969 Capitol album I Do Not Play No Rock ‘n’ Roll recorded at Malaco Studios in Jackson, his mentorship of a young Bonnie Raitt, and the Rolling Stones’ 1971 cover of “You Gotta Move” on Sticky Fingers. It closes with his final recordings at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, his death from cancer in Memphis on July 3, 1972, at 68, his Masonic burial at Hammond Hill Baptist Church, and the 1993 ceremony that finally replaced his damaged, misspelled headstone.

• How nearly 40 years of weekend gigs for exhausted farm workers shaped the trance-like drone of Hill Country blues
• Why the 1959 timing of the Lomax recordings mattered as the folk and blues revival caught fire
• How pocket knife, bone, and glass each changed his slide tone, and why the ring finger placement was so advanced
• Why he insisted he did not play rock and roll even while plugging in and being covered by the Rolling Stones
• How the Mount Zion Memorial Fund and Dick Waterman corrected the historical record at his grave decades later