Roosevelt Sykes was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1999, yet his grave in New Orleans went unmarked for 32 years. This episode follows the pianist known as the Honeydripper from his 1906 birth in the sawmill town of Elmar, Arkansas, through summers at his preacher grandfather’s farm near West Helena, where a 10-year-old with no training taught himself to make a church organ mimic his own singing voice. At 15 he hit the road playing turpentine camps, sawmills and levee camps along the Mississippi River, where an older pianist named Lee Green, known as Pork Chop, protected him and taught him the split-rhythm technique that let his two hands work like two independent musicians.

We trace his one-dollar-a-night gig at Katy Red’s barrelhouse in East St. Louis, the 1929 New York recording session arranged by talent scout Jesse Johnson that produced a lasting blues standard, the competing stories behind his nickname, and the pseudonyms like Easy Papa Johnson, Dobby Bragg and Willie Kelly he used to record for rival labels. We also cover his 12-piece Honeydrippers band in 1940s Chicago, his pragmatic mid-1950s relocation to New Orleans when electric blues drowned out acoustic piano, his 1960s folk-revival rebirth, his death in 1983 and the headstone finally placed by the Killer Blues Headstone Project in 2015.

• Why Sykes felt no conflict between his lifelong Christian faith and playing explicit, gritty secular blues
• How investing early record money in a St. Louis speakeasy selling liquor and fried fish was shrewd vertical integration
• Why singing a fraction of a second ahead of his piano created an irresistible forward momentum
• How he built a full-orchestra sound using rarely more than three chords
• The late-career shift from 12-bar blues toward tighter eight-bar structures influenced by pop and gospel