A special education teacher in mid-1970s Boston and a four-time Blues Music Award-winning guitarist who traded solos with Gregg Allman in sold-out arenas are the same person. Ronald Horvath, known as Ronnie Earl, was born in 1953 in Queens, studied American history at C.W. Post before transferring to Boston University, graduated in 1975, and went to work teaching children with disabilities. Then he saw Muddy Waters play the Jazz Workshop in Boston, and everything changed.

This episode follows his multi-day Greyhound bus trips to Chicago’s South Side, the endorsement of Koko Taylor, his travels to New Orleans and Austin to absorb Kim Wilson and Jimmie Vaughan, his rhythm guitar apprenticeship at the Speakeasy in Cambridge, and his 1979 arrival as lead guitarist of Roomful of Blues. It then covers the 1984 formation of the Broadcasters, a solo career on Black Top Records beginning in 1986, albums like Soul Searchin’, Peace of Mind, and Language of the Soul, the health crisis of 2000, his Stony Plain Records years, and his later life as a professor of the blues.

• How the blues community’s oral tradition of mentorship works, and why showing up night after night matters more than an audition
• The story behind the band name the Broadcasters, a nod to Fender’s original 1950 solid-body guitar
• How his special education training shaped a rotating band that included Darrell Nulisch, Jerry Portnoy, and Bruce Katz, and why a Hammond B3 forces a guitarist to weave rather than strum
• Diane Blue becoming the first female Broadcaster in 2014, and the sudden 2017 death of bassist Jim Mouradian
• Five years as an associate professor at Berklee College of Music, the instructional video Blues Guitar with Soul, annual birthday shows at the Bull Run in Shirley, Massachusetts, and his 26th album Mercy Me in 2022