In 1973, millions of viewers watched Redd Foxx sing and dance to Shake That Thing on Sanford and Son. Almost none of them knew that the man who wrote it, and who essentially invented the solo singer-songwriter format in recorded music, was lying in an unmarked grave in a Chicago cemetery. William Henry Jackson, better known as Papa Charlie Jackson, was born in New Orleans in November 1887, a date known only from a later draft card. He cut his teeth in traveling minstrel and medicine shows, learning to hold a distracted crowd standing in the dirt, and became a formidable multi-instrumentalist on guitar, ukulele, and especially the piercing banjo guitar.

This episode follows Jackson to Chicago’s chaotic Maxwell Street Market, where busking over the din forged the booming voice and percussive attack that let him do what no one had done before: in August 1924, he recorded Airy Man Blues and Papa’s Lawdy Lawdy Blues for Paramount, becoming the first self-accompanied blues musician on record. We explain why the acoustic recording horn had made that impossible until then, how one man replacing a full band upended the economics of the industry, and how Jackson pioneered the cheeky, danceable hokum style before dying in Chicago in May 1938 at 50.

• Why the banjo guitar’s volume mattered on Maxwell Street and in a studio that still used acoustic horns instead of microphones
• Backing Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Hattie McDaniel as a sought-after studio accompanist
• Shave ‘Em Dry, Shake That Thing, All I Want Is a Spoonful, and Salty Dog Blues, and 66 recorded sides stretching into the 1930s on OKeh
• The September 1929 two-part jam with ragtime master Blind Blake and a 1935 session with Big Bill Broonzy
• Covers by Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the Killer Blues Headstone Project marker finally placed at Lincoln Cemetery in 2013