In a deafening 1950s Chicago blues club, a guitarist was unknowingly writing the blueprint for California surf rock, the phrasing of the Grateful Dead and the sound that would terrify a young Eric Clapton. This episode explores the life and legacy of Freddie King, one of the three kings of the blues guitar alongside Albert King and B.B. King, none of them related. Born in Texas in 1934 and taught guitar by his mother and uncle by age six, King absorbed the relaxed, open-string acoustic Texas tradition before his family joined the Great Migration to Chicago’s South Side in 1949. By 18 he was working in a steel mill, married to Jessie Burnett, starting what would become a family of seven children, and sneaking into clubs to study Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James.

Repeatedly rejected by Chess Records for sounding too much like B.B. King, Freddie pivoted to Chicago’s scrappier West Side and forged a hybrid style using a plastic thumb pick and a metal index-finger pick on a Gibson ES-335. A 1960 session for King/Federal Records produced Have You Ever Loved a Woman and the instrumental B-side Hideaway, a collage of Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy McCracklin and the Peter Gunn theme that reached number five on the R&B chart and cracked the Billboard pop top 30 in 1961. We follow his surf-era instrumentals, tours with James Brown and Sam Cooke, his move to Atlantic and Leon Russell’s Shelter Records, festival bills with Led Zeppelin, his pioneering multiracial backing band, and the punishing 300-days-a-year schedule that led to his death from ulcers and pancreatitis in December 1976 at age 42.

• How the Texas porch tradition of playing bass and lead at once carried into King’s electric sound
• Why Chess Records passed on a genius over a vocal resemblance, and how that rejection sparked his West Side reinvention
• The physics of the plastic thumb pick, the metal finger pick and the semi-hollow ES-335 at high volume
• How Hideaway, San-Ho-Zay and The Stumble were marketed to white teenagers as surf music
• His influence on Eric Clapton, Jerry Garcia and Grand Funk Railroad, Freddie King Day in Texas in 1993 and his 2012 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction by ZZ Top