What kind of band writes a song that Frank Sinatra, Howlin’ Wolf, the Grateful Dead, Bob Wills, Cream and Jack White could all cover? The answer is the Mississippi Sheiks, a 1930s guitar and fiddle group from Bolton, Mississippi, built around the Chatmon family. This episode starts with patriarch Henderson Chatmon, who lived during slavery and earned the distinction of a “musicianer,” someone who could sight-read sheet music, and passed that formal literacy to his children as a portable trade. Brothers Lonnie and Sam Chatmon, collaborator Walter Vinson, and brother Armenter Chatmon, who ran a parallel solo career as the risque star Bo Carter, formed a group that could play waltzes, Tin Pan Alley pop, ragtime and jazz, a human jukebox that the industry’s race-records marketing boxed into the label country blues.

In 1930 they recorded Sitting on Top of the World, an immediate hit that became the theme for the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, a bluegrass standard through Doc Watson and Bill Monroe, a jazz-pop number for Nat King Cole, and a British blues-rock anthem for Cream, before entering the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008 and the National Recording Registry. The hosts detail the grueling Jim Crow touring circuit from juke joints to studios in Chicago and New York, roughly 70 tracks in five years for OKeh, Paramount and Bluebird, socially observant originals like Sales Tax, The World Is Going Wrong and I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You, and pseudonyms like the Mississippi Mud Steppers that push their output to about 100 sides. Then the flat-fee recording model and the Depression ended it all by 1935, sending the brothers back to farming, until the 1960s folk revival brought Sam Chatmon and Walter Vinson back into studios and later honors including a 2009 tribute album and a 2013 Third Man Records reissue.

• Henderson Chatmon, the sight-reading “musicianer” born into slavery who trained his children in the math of music
• Bo Carter’s double life as a solo star and how his fame stabilized the family band
• Why the country blues label distorts a repertoire of waltzes, pop, ragtime and jazz
• The 80-year afterlife of Sitting on Top of the World across bluegrass, jazz, rock and film
• Flat fees, no royalties, and the return to the fields before the 1960s revival found them alive