In the 1990s, a gold-plated, steel-bodied tricone resonator guitar turned up in an Illinois pawn shop and was later sold to a Seattle music museum for $85,000. Its original owner had died in obscurity after the instrument was stolen from him while he lived in poverty on Chicago’s South Side. That owner was Tampa Red, born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia, around the turn of the century, orphaned as a young child, and raised in Tampa by his grandmother and aunt under the name Hudson Whittaker. He learned by watching his older brother Eddie, picked up techniques from a street performer called Piccolo Pete, and studied the records of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Mamie Smith, developing a bottleneck slide technique that made the guitar weep and sing like a human voice.

This episode follows his 1925 move to Chicago during the Great Migration, his gig backing Ma Rainey, and his 1928 partnership with Thomas A. Dorsey, known as Georgia Tom, that produced the million-selling hokum hit It’s Tight Like That. It explains how he became the first Black musician to adopt the National steel resonator guitar, why that volume let him play single-string melodic lines that anticipated the electric guitar solo, and how his Chicago home became a haven for migrating musicians like Big Bill Broonzy and Big Maceo Merriweather. It closes with the death of his wife Frances in 1953, his slide into alcoholism, his 1974 rediscovery in poverty by researcher Jim O’Neal, and his death in 1981 after years in a state hospital and nursing home.

• Why hokum music was a joyous rebellion rather than a cash grab, and how It’s Tight Like That earned Red and Dorsey around $4,000 in royalties
• How the resonator’s metal cones worked like speaker cones, freeing guitarists from strumming block chords just to be heard
• The Bluebird sound of Tampa Red and the Chicago Five on Victor Records, and how it laid the groundwork for jump blues and rock and roll
• His 1940s switch to electric guitar, the sustain it gave his slide playing, and R&B chart hits into the early 1950s
• A legacy of more than 330 recorded songs, 251 of them between 1928 and 1942, and the single-string slide blueprint later followed by Muddy Waters and Elmore James