Pink Floyd’s 1973 album stayed on the Billboard charts for 14 years, but the man behind half of the band’s name spent much of his life playing acoustic guitar for loose change in the dirt lots of South Carolina. This episode reconstructs the life of Pinkney Anderson, known as Pink, born February 12, 1900 and raised around Greenville and Spartanburg. At 14 he joined Dr. William R. Kerr’s Indian Remedy Company, a traveling medicine show in which his music drew the crowd and the doctor sold the tonics. Far from a teenage phase, the medicine show circuit remained his primary livelihood into the 1950s, touring with a Potawatomi performer billed as Chief Thundercloud and with harmonica player Arthur Jackson, known as Peg Leg Sam.

We trace his 1928 Columbia recordings with Blind Simmie Dooley, including Papa’s ‘Bout to Get Mad and Every Day in the Week Blues, the 22-year recording gap brought on by the Great Depression, and the folk revival that led folklorist Paul Clayton to record him at the Virginia State Fair in May 1950. Albums followed on Riverside, Bluesville and Folkways, among them American Street Songs with Reverend Gary Davis in 1956, Carolina Bluesman in 1961 and Medicine Show Man in 1962, plus the 1963 documentary The Bluesmen. That revival is how his name reached the liner notes of a 1962 Blind Boy Fuller album read by Syd Barrett, who combined it with Floyd Council’s. The episode closes with Anderson’s late-1960s stroke, a final early-1970s tour of Boston and New York organized by his student Roy Book Binder, and his death on October 12, 1974 at age 74.

• How a medicine show worked as the 1914 equivalent of free entertainment wrapped around a sponsor’s pitch
• The mechanics of Piedmont blues: ragtime piano translated to a six-string guitar with an alternating thumb bass
• Why post-war folklorists launched a nationwide scavenger hunt for rural musicians before their styles were lost
• The knee-to-knee mentorship that carried the tradition from Blind Simmie Dooley to Anderson to Roy Book Binder and his son Little Pink Anderson
• A gravestone in Spartanburg’s Lincoln Memorial Gardens etched with a Gibson J-50 guitar