Otis Spann laid the piano foundation beneath Muddy Waters, recorded with Eric Clapton, and earned the title of premier post-war Chicago blues pianist. Then he died of liver cancer in 1970 and lay for nearly thirty years in an unmarked grave at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. This episode reconstructs his life from contradictory sources, beginning with a birth that some references place in Jackson, Mississippi in 1930 and census researchers place in Belzoni in 1924. Raised in a musical dynasty with a piano-playing father, a guitarist mother who worked with Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, a preacher-musician stepfather and lessons from Little Brother Montgomery by age seven, Spann was gigging in bands around Jackson by fourteen.

After moving to Chicago in 1946, Spann came up under Big Maceo Merriweather and forged a heavy, percussive attack at the Tic Toc Lounge that could stand toe to toe with early amplifiers. He joined Muddy Waters in late 1952 and stayed until 1968, anchoring Hoochie Coochie Man, I’m Ready and Got My Mojo Working while cutting Chess sessions with Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley and releasing his own 1954 single It Must Have Been the Devil with B.B. King on guitar. The 1960s brought the British Invasion’s reverence, a Copenhagen album called Good Morning Mr. Blues, The Blues Is Where It’s At, and The Bottom of the Blues featuring vocals from his wife Lucille. In 1999, blues enthusiast Steve Salter and the Killer Blues Headstone Project rallied fans around the world to finally place a marker on his grave.

• Why birth records for Black Southerners under Jim Crow leave Spann’s birth year disputed between 1924 and 1930
• How his rolling left-hand bass lines and piercing right-hand trills acted as the mortar holding electric Chicago blues together
• The disputed piano credit on Chuck Berry’s 1956 You Can’t Catch Me, and why 1950s session players went undocumented
• Recording with Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Buddy Guy and Big Mama Thornton as the rock generation embraced him
• The fan-funded 1999 headstone, the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival site named for him, and his 1980 Blues Hall of Fame induction