In the early 1930s, a 17-year-old in the Mississippi Delta sold his family’s last working horse for $15, gave half to the grandmother who raised him, and spent the remaining $7.50 on a mail-order guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalog. That gamble by McKinley Morganfield, nicknamed Muddy by his grandmother Della Grant for playing in a nearby creek, altered the trajectory of global culture. His conservatory was the local Baptist church, where he absorbed the trembling, emotional vocal style he would pour into secular blues. In 1941, Alan Lomax and John W. Work III hauled a battery-powered disc-cutting machine into his home on the Stovall plantation for the Library of Congress, and hearing his own record on a jukebox convinced him he belonged in the industry.

This episode follows Muddy Waters to Chicago in 1943, where the sheer noise of South Side clubs forced him to buy an electric guitar in 1944 and rethink his entire technique. We look at his fight with Chess Records to record with his own live band, his rivalry with Howlin’ Wolf, the 1958 tour of England that horrified folk purists and inspired the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Fleetwood Mac, the psychedelic misfire of Electric Mud, and the stripped-down 1970s resurgence with Johnny Winter that finally gave him the stature he had earned.

• Why the electric guitar was a survival tool before it was an artistic statement, and how amplification changed the physics of his playing
• The template-setting band of Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, Otis Spann, Elgin Evans, and Willie Dixon
• What slide guitar actually does on the fretboard, and why British critics dismissed it as a screaming guitar in 1958
• Why fuzz and wah-wah pedals buried his nuance on Electric Mud, and his blunt verdict on the album
• Eric Clapton as best man at his 1979 wedding, his death in Illinois in 1983, the legal battles over his catalog, and Billy Gibbons’s Muddywood guitar built from his childhood cabin