Imagine laying down a track whose central theme would be adapted by Muddy Waters and inspire the name of the Rolling Stones, then leaving behind exactly 16 recorded songs, a single photograph and no trace of where you went. This episode tracks Robert Petway, a phantom of the Mississippi Delta blues. Researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc place his birth around 1902 or 1903 in Itta Bena, Leflore County, Mississippi, though a competing theory puts him in Gee’s Bend, Alabama in 1907 and living until 1978 in Chicago. Census records list a Robert Pettyway, age seven, in 1910 and a Robert Pettaway, age 18, working a farm in 1920, phonetic spellings written down by census takers who treated sharecroppers as labor rather than citizens.

We follow Petway’s defining partnership with Tommy McClennan, both laborers at a firm called Williams and Applewhite by day and roadhouse musicians by night, and their move north during the Great Migration. Petway’s entire recorded legacy comes from two Bluebird Records sessions in Chicago on March 28, 1941 and February 20, 1942, which produced Rockin’ Chair Blues, Sleepy Woman Blues, Ride ‘Em On Down and the masterpiece Catfish Blues. Four days before that final session, a Robert Pitway registered for the draft in Yazoo City on the same day and with the same employer as Tom McClennan. After the session ended, Petway walked out of the studio and disappeared from the historical record forever, with fellow bluesman David Honeyboy Edwards saying nobody he knew ever heard what became of him.

• Why proving Petway existed requires historical detective work across contradictory census spellings
• The deep-water metaphor of Catfish Blues and its direct line to Muddy Waters’ Rollin’ Stone
• Who wrote Catfish Blues: Petway, McClennan’s Deep Blue Sea, Leland guitarist Tom Toy, or a communal oral tradition
• How the disposable business model of 1940s record labels let a foundational artist vanish unnoticed
• Sixteen songs as architectural blueprints for Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix