It’s a perennial truth, well known to laborers, wanderers, and blues singers: the road of hardship winds inevitably through hospitals. The hospital ballad is a staple of American roots music, native to landscapes as remote as the Mississippi Delta and the Oklahoma plain.

That’s not a surprise in a country where so many of our singers endured trials we can hardly imagine — the miseries of the Dust Bowl, the horrors of southern sharecropping, the indignities of the chain gain — only to end up destitute patients in segregated hospitals, reviled by everyone except the hippies who sometimes gathered at their bedsides.

That was how Skip James — presumed lost to time even as his records were bought and sold and treasured — was “rediscovered,” less than a decade from death at sixty-two years old. In 1964, a gang of collectors tracked him to a cancer ward in Tunica, Mississippi, where an open sewer ran through town into the 1990s.