A full decade before Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Guitar Watson was doing handstands with an electric guitar, roaming out the club door and down the street on a 150-foot cable with his amp cranked to its limits. Decades later he told an interviewer he had not merely anticipated rap but invented it. This episode charts the shape-shifting life of John Watson Jr., born in Houston in 1935 to a pianist father and a singing-preacher grandfather who bought him a guitar at 11 on the condition that he never play the devil’s music, a promise that snapped when his mother moved him to Los Angeles in 1950.

We follow the teenage jump blues prodigy through gigs with Amos Milburn and Chuck Higgins, his 1952 Federal Records debut as Young John Watson, the 1954 Joan Crawford Western that gave him his name, and the violent pick-less string-snapping technique he called stressifying the strings. From the commercially doomed but visionary instrumental Space Guitar and the first Gangster of Love in 1957, we trace his drastic 1970s reinvention as a gold-toothed funk anti-hero, his 1980s retreat after the shooting death of Larry Williams, the Grammy-nominated 1994 comeback Bow Wow, and his death on stage in Yokohama, Japan in 1996 at age 61.

• Why Space Guitar failed in 1954 yet worked as research and development for his future sound
• Sharing the Wrigley Field stage with Louis Armstrong and touring with Little Richard, Johnny Otis and Larry Williams
• The wardrobe and rhythmic rewiring behind A Real Mother for Ya, his highest-charting single, and playing on Frank Zappa’s One Size Fits All
• How Steve Miller lifted Gangster of Love, Zappa credited Three Hours Past Midnight, and Etta James called him her primary model
• Collapsing mid-verse during Superman Lover after saying he wanted to die on stage, and Mike Vernon on why purists could never pin him down