When Hubert Sumlin died in December 2011, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards quietly covered his funeral expenses. This episode explains why. Born in 1931 in Greenwood, Mississippi and raised in Hughes, Arkansas, Sumlin picked up the guitar at eight and as a boy sneaked into a juke joint to watch Howlin’ Wolf perform. In 1954, a year after Wolf relocated to Chicago and lost longtime guitarist Willie Johnson, Wolf sent for the young Arkansan, first as second guitar behind Jody Williams and then, from 1955, as the primary guitarist who would anchor Wolf’s band for decades.

We break down what made Sumlin’s playing so wild: sharp, angular, unpredictable phrasing and jarring silences that engineered tension inside the 12-bar form. We also cover Wolf’s surprising decision to send him to the Chicago Conservatory of Music, his brief 1956 defection to rival Muddy Waters, the 1962 rocking chair album that Mojo ranked the third greatest guitar album ever, the Wolf Gang years after Wolf’s 1976 death, and a late-career renaissance capped by the 2004 album About Them Shoes, recorded with Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Levon Helm, David Johansen and James Cotton even as he lost a lung.

• The childhood night Sumlin sneaked in to see Howlin’ Wolf and the 1954 invitation that changed his life
• Why Wolf kept him on rhythm guitar for a year before Jody Williams’ departure made him lead player
• How classical training at the Chicago Conservatory gave a juke joint guitarist the discipline to break the rules
• The 1962 self-titled Howlin’ Wolf record, the 1964 European sessions that began his solo recordings, and the Wolf Gang tours until about 1980
• Four Grammy nominations, Blues Foundation Hall of Fame induction in 2008, Rolling Stone’s number 43 ranking, and recording for Stephen Dale Petit just days before his death at 80