In the summer of 2013, a call came in on behalf of Bob Dylan asking Duke Robillard to become his lead guitarist. To follow a songwriter whose catalog spans folk, country, early rock and roll, Delta blues, and swing, you need an encyclopedic command of American music, and Robillard had spent nearly six decades building exactly that. Born Michael John Robillard in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1948, he first played as Mike Honey Bear Robillard and took a day job on the factory floor of the Guild Guitar Company, learning how wood, pickups, and electronics shape tone before he ever headlined a festival.

This episode treats his career as a series of case studies in versatility: co-founding the horn-driven jump blues band Roomful of Blues with pianist Al Copley in 1967 while everyone else was buying fuzz pedals, walking away from it in 1979, and then cross-training as a sideman with rockabilly singer Robert Gordon and the Legendary Blues Band. It follows his 1990 move into the Fabulous Thunderbirds after Jimmie Vaughan’s departure, his jazz collaborations with Herb Ellis, his archival solo albums for Stony Plain Records, and the production work that earned him a Keeping the Blues Alive award in 2004.

• How building guitars on a factory line gave Robillard a mechanic’s understanding of resonance, tone, and how hard an instrument can be pushed
• Why quitting Roomful of Blues after the albums Roomful of Blues and Let’s Have a Party was a deliberate escape from stagnation
• The technical leaps behind rockabilly hybrid picking and slapback echo, and the Chicago grit required alongside former Muddy Waters band members
• Stepping into Jimmie Vaughan’s role on Walk That Walk, Talk That Talk without cloning his sparse Texas style
• Chord substitutions, the New Guitar Summit with Gerry Beaudoin and J. Geils, four W.C. Handy Awards for Best Blues Guitarist between 2000 and 2004, and multiple Grammy nominations