In 1953, a young Lee Baker Jr. was strumming an acoustic guitar on his front porch in Port Arthur, Texas, when zydeco and blues star Clifton Chenier happened to walk down the street, heard him play, and offered him a job in his touring band on the spot. Born December 18, 1933, in Dubuisson, Louisiana, Baker first absorbed music watching his grandfather play banjo, then discovered the electrified showmanship of B.B. King, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, and T-Bone Walker in Port Arthur’s clubs. Touring with Chenier became his apprenticeship in show business, and it led to a solo run as Guitar Junior on Goldband Records in Lake Charles, where Family Rules, The Crawl, and Made in the Shade helped define the sound of swamp pop.

When he moved to Chicago in 1960, he discovered another bluesman, Luther Johnson, already performing as Guitar Junior, and had to rebuild his reputation from zero under a new name: Lonnie Brooks. This episode follows that grind through the West Side clubs and the steel towns of Indiana, his years as a sideman for Jimmy Reed, a career-changing 1974 European tour, and the night Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer heard him at Pepper’s Hideout. The result was Bayou Lightning, the 1979 album that won the Grand Prix du Disque at the Montreux Jazz Festival and gave critics a new label for his fusion of Louisiana rhythm and Chicago grit: voodoo blues.

• How Chenier’s band taught him to pace a set, work a crowd, and treat music as a real profession
• What swamp pop is, and how Cajun and Creole rhythms merged with 1950s rhythm and blues and electric guitar
• The name collision that erased the Guitar Junior brand, and the lessons learned holding down rhythm behind Jimmy Reed, including the 1961 Carnegie Hall live album
• Crossover moments with Roy Clark on Hee Haw, Johnny Winter on Wound Up Tight, a 1993 tour with B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Koko Taylor, and an impromptu jam with Eric Clapton at Buddy Guy’s Legends
• Building a family dynasty with sons Ronnie and Wayne Baker Brooks, co-authoring Blues for Dummies with Wayne and Cub Koda in 1998, appearing in Blues Brothers 2000, and his death in Chicago on April 1, 2017, at 83