William Christopher Handy grew up in Florence, Alabama, in a log cabin built by his grandfather, the son of a pastor who believed a guitar was a tool of the devil. When young Handy saved his pennies from picking berries and making lye soap to buy one, his father made him exchange it for a dictionary. This episode explains how that suppression turned him into an elite listener who heard music in whippoorwills, the water of Cypress Creek and the polyrhythms of a shovel brigade at the McNabb furnace, and how a formally trained cornetist came to be called the father of a genre he never claimed to invent.

We follow his two Mississippi Delta epiphanies around 1903 to 1905: a man at the Tutwiler train station sliding a knife along guitar strings, and Prince McCoy’s ragged trio electrifying a Cleveland dance hall while Handy’s polished band stood aside. Then we trace the Memphis campaign song for Edward Crump that became The Memphis Blues in 1912, the tango-to-blues trick of St. Louis Blues in 1914, his New York publishing partnership with Harry Pace, the 1920 Crazy Blues explosion that reshaped his business, his later years as the historian of the blues, and the 1943 subway platform fall that left him blind.

• How Handy translated microtones into notation by flattening the third and seventh notes to create blue notes
• Why the AAB lyric structure gives listeners time to process and performers time to improvise
• The heartbreak of selling the rights to The Memphis Blues for one hundred dollars
• Why white bandleaders like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, not established Black vaudeville stars, first recorded his songs
• Maurice Ravel’s blues-inspired composition and the 25,000 mourners who attended his 1958 Harlem funeral