John Lee Hooker was celebrated with a year-long 100th birthday party in 2017, but census records from 1920 and 1930 suggest the guest of honor was actually born in 1912 and turning 105. That mystery is a fitting opening for a bluesman who recorded under a dozen names and played by his own internal clock. This episode traces his path from a strict Mississippi sharecropping household, where only religious music was allowed, to a stepfather named William Moore who brought a droning one-chord Louisiana blues style into the home, to running away at 14 and surviving on Beale Street in Memphis.

We follow Hooker to wartime Detroit, where a job at Ford and a club scene dominated by loud piano players pushed him to electrify his hypnotic boogie. Producer Bernie Besman miked a wooden shipping pallet under his stomping foot to capture Boogie Chillen, the best-selling race record of 1949. From there we cover his studio-hopping pseudonyms, his reliance on auditory memory as an illiterate songwriter, the Vee-Jay years with Eddie Taylor, the British blues boom, the Canned Heat collaboration, The Blues Brothers, and a Grammy-winning late career with The Healer that stretched into his 80s.

• How stepfather William Moore and Tony Hollins handed a boy forbidden from secular music the tools of his career
• Why Hooker’s 13-bar and 14-and-a-half-bar blues baffled backing bands and how a shipping pallet solved it
• The pseudonyms Texas Slim, Delta John, The Boogie Man and John Lee Cooker, and the exploitative flat-fee economy behind them
• Dimples charting in the UK eight years late, Hooker ‘n Heat reaching Billboard, and Boom Boom on Maxwell Street
• The Healer, Mr. Lucky, Chill Out and Don’t Look Back with Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt and Van Morrison, five California houses, and multiple Hall of Fame inductions