Earl Hooker’s warm-up instrumental was secretly recorded, sold to Chess Records, and released with Muddy Waters’ vocals pasted over it as You Shook Me. Then he went back and did it again on purpose. Born in 1930 near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and raised in Chicago after his family joined the Great Migration, Hooker was a cousin of John Lee Hooker, picked up the guitar around age ten, and, because of a severe lifelong stutter, poured his voice into the instrument rather than singing. By twelve he was busking on Chicago street corners with Bo Diddley and riding streetcars all day playing for tips with Junior Wells while dodging truancy officers.

This episode explores how Hooker fused the showmanship and jazz chords of T-Bone Walker with the vocal-like slide of mentor Robert Nighthawk, playing slide in standard tuning with a short steel slide so he could switch between fretted chords and screaming single-note runs mid-song. It follows his years as house guitarist for the Chief, Profile, and Age labels, the 1961 Blue Guitar session that became You Shook Me and You Need Love, both later adapted by Led Zeppelin, and his lifelong battle with tuberculosis, including a nearly year-long hospitalization in 1967. After leaving the hospital against doctors’ advice, he recorded Two Bugs and a Roach with Pinetop Perkins, embraced double-neck guitars, tape delay, and the wah-wah pedal, jammed with Jimi Hendrix, played the Fillmore West, and toured Europe in October 1969 before dying in April 1970 at age 40.

• Why B.B. King called Hooker one of a kind and the Blues Hall of Fame named him the blues guitarist’s guitarist in 2013
• How standard-tuning slide freed him from the limitations of open tunings
• The flat-fee session economy that let producers build hits on his uncredited playing
• Using a wah-wah pedal to give his guitar the fluent human voice his stutter denied him
• Twenty concerts in 23 days across nine countries on the American Folk Blues Festival tour