Joseph Young Jr. was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1927, moved to Milwaukee by 1945, and tried amateur boxing in the late 1940s before deciding a guitar was a more sustainable way to make a living. He took his stage name from a 1949 stop-motion film about a giant ape, made his recording debut for Jiffy Records in Louisiana in 1955, and then moved to Chicago, where he spent the better part of a decade as one of the city’s most sought-after rhythm guitarists.

This episode explains what Mighty Joe Young was actually doing on landmark records like Magic Sam’s West Side Soul (1967) and Black Magic (1968) and Otis Rush’s Cold Day in Hell, and why producers like Willie Dixon kept hiring him. It then follows his 1970s solo turn, beginning with Blues with a Touch of Soul on Delmark in 1971 and continuing on Ovation Records, his residency at Wise Fools Pub, the use of his song Turning Point in Michael Mann’s 1981 film Thief, and the 1986 neck surgery that left his fingers permanently numb.

• Why a larger-than-life stage name worked as a practical tool for cutting through the noise of 1950s industrial-city nightclubs
• How the aggressive, minor-key West Side sound depended on a rhythm guitarist with a rock-solid, propulsive right hand
• His blues-soul synthesis of the 1970s, including horn sections, backing vocals, and the string synthesizers critic Robert Christgau called intrusive
• Lyrics grounded in mothers-in-law, barbecue, and the value of a dollar, and why Michael Mann wanted that authenticity for Thief
• The album derailed by surgery in 1986 and finally released as Mighty Man in 1997, a second spinal surgery in 1998, and his death from pneumonia in 1999 at 71