This week we're listening to early jazz guitarists who faced individual and societal struggles, even resistance by the jazz world to their chosen instrument. Guitarists Eddie Lang, Lonnie Johnson, Nick Lucas, Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie Christian, and Django Reinhardt will be featured.

With performances of Earl "Fatha" Hines, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Stephanie Trick, and Dorothy Donegan we'll tickle some ivories — but only scratch the surface of — recorded piano delights from the 1920s through the 1940s.

This week we're heading to Harlem, circa 1932, for a tour of some of the great jazz and dance clubs as mapped out by African American cartoonist Elmer Simms Campbell. He drew a map, titled "Night Clubs of Harlem, 1932" and published in Manhattan Magazine, The map faces southwest, bounded by 110th street, and runs along Central Park's northern edge. It concentrates on Lenox Avenue and Seventh Avenue — or "heaven" as Simms called it. Performances by Ellington, Lunceford, Webb, Fitzgerald, and McKinney.

This week, the Fletcher Henderson Band, led by one of the more unlikely and reluctant leaders in jazz, but easily one of the most talented. Fletcher Henderson, nicknamed "Smack," for the way he smacked his lips, apparently even in his sleep, was born in Cuthbert, Georgia, in 1897 to a middle-class African American family. In 1922 he formed his own band. His first steady gig with his band was at the Club Alabam on Broadway in 1924, but only after the band's players—not Henderson—talked their way into auditioning for their first long-term engagement.

In May 1941 the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female, integrated high school swing band out of Piney Woods, Mississippi, was out on the road doing dance gigs, when they decided to break free, appropriating the bus and taking charge of their own careers — destined to become one of the best swing bands in history.

Mary Lou Williams is one of the great figures in jazz — pianist, arranger and teacher. We'll listen to some of Mary Lou Williams' earliest recordings as a stride pianist, then as a pianist and arranger as a member of the Andy Kirk band, and later the Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington bands. We'll hear some of her work with the beboppers of the late 1940s. We'll also sample an interview she did in the 1970s with Marian McPartland, and we'll finish with a live recording she did at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1978.