In 1964, three young blues researchers knocked on the door of a retired railroad porter in Rochester, New York, and had to inform him that he was famous. Edward James House Jr., known as Son House, had walked away from music in 1943 and had no idea that a new generation regarded his 1930 Paramount recordings as sacred texts of Delta blues. Born in 1902 near Lyon, Mississippi, House grew up watching his musician father swing between heavy drinking and the deaconship of a Baptist church. He rejected instruments entirely, despised the blues as sinful, and was preaching sermons by age 15 in Algiers, Louisiana.

This episode follows House’s collapse of faith through a bitter marriage and grueling plantation labor, the double life of preaching on Sunday and drinking on Saturday, and the 1927 night in a juke joint when bottleneck slide guitar hit him like a lightning bolt. It covers the shooting that sent him to Parchman Farm on a 15-year sentence, his release after roughly two years, his exile to Lula, Mississippi, where he fell in with Charley Patton, and the 1930 Grafton, Wisconsin session whose records failed commercially as the Great Depression hit. It then traces his years mentoring Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, the 1941 Library of Congress recordings, and a comeback in which a 22-year-old fan had to teach him how to play like Son House again.

• Why the weeping microtones of slide guitar resonated with a former preacher, and how he dragged the cadence of the sermon into the juke joint
• The corrupt planter labor system that likely secured his early release from Parchman, and the warning to stay out of Clarksdale
• Alan Lomax and John W. Work III recording House at a Lake Cormorant store with trains rumbling past in the background
• Alan Wilson, later of Canned Heat, reteaching House his own tunings and slide placements, followed by a 1965 Columbia album, the Newport Folk Festival, and European tours
• The cowboy hat he wore as a tribute to his happiest job on a Louisiana horse ranch, his retirement in 1974, and his death from larynx cancer in Detroit in 1988 at age 86