Around 1900 in Mississippi, a three-year-old laid a guitar flat on the floorboards and crawled underneath it to figure out how the machine worked. That boy was Sam Chatmon, born in 1897 in Bolton, Mississippi, into a family string band with roots going back to slavery and possibly a half-brother of Delta blues father Charlie Patton. This episode follows a street-corner musician who survived obscurity and plantation labor to become a celebrated festival star half a century later.

The conversation covers the Chatmon family’s work playing rags, ballads, waltzes, and dance hits for paying audiences, Sam’s mastery of guitar, banjo, mandolin, and harmonica, and the 1930s recordings made alongside the Mississippi Sheiks, formed by his brothers Lonnie Chatmon and Bo Carter with Walter Vinson. It then explains why those records brought no financial security, his two decades of plantation labor in Hollandale, his 1960 rediscovery and Arhoolie Records sessions, and a second act that ran until his death on February 2, 1983, at 86.

• Why the lone tortured bluesman image is largely a later marketing category, and how working musicians functioned as human jukeboxes
• How one-take, direct-to-disc recording sessions rewarded the flawless efficiency the Chatmons learned on street corners
• The flat-fee economics of race records, the Depression, wartime shellac rationing, and the shift to electric blues that pushed acoustic string bands aside
• His 1970 trip to California, the California Sheiks with Sue Draheim and Kenny Hall, and appearances at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Mariposa Folk Festival, and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
• The 1998 headstone funded by Bonnie Raitt through the Mount Zion Memorial Fund, inscribed Sitting on Top of the World, and his Mississippi Blues Trail marker