Picture the heaviest distorted guitar tone you can imagine, then drop it into a tiny Memphis room in 1950, played by one man who is also stomping a drum kit with his feet and blowing a harmonica held in a rack around his neck. That was Joe Hill Louis, born Lester Hill in 1921, and this deep dive assembles his biography from session logs and discography notes to show how an almost unknown musician laid the raw foundations of rock and heavy metal.

We follow him from leaving home at 14 during the Depression and working at the Peabody Hotel to taking over the Pepticon Boy radio show on WDIA from B.B. King, recording under aliases like The Be-Bop Boy and Chicago Sunny Boy for competing labels, and cutting Boogie in the Park in July 1950 with Sam Phillips, the only release on Phillips’s first label. The episode ends with his death at 35 from tetanus contracted through a cut sustained on a manual labor job.

• How he rigged a self-contained one-man band setup and why venue economics made it necessary
• The physics of vacuum tube clipping and why an overdriven amp went from mistake to aesthetic
• Playing guitar on Rufus Thomas’s Bear Cat, the answer record to Hound Dog that triggered a lawsuit against Sun Records
• A co-writing credit on Tiger Man, later recorded by Elvis Presley
• Why the Memphis scene worked like a repertory company, and what his story says about the original gig economy