No one knows exactly when or where Sonny Boy Williamson II was born, and the name etched into the history books was taken from a rival Chicago star who was still alive at the time. This episode digs into census data, historical records and musical archives to untangle the life of Alex Miller, nicknamed Rice Miller, a sharecropper’s son from Mississippi who claimed five different birth years, aged himself up by more than a decade to seem like the original, and honed a theatrical street act in Greenville that included playing a harmonica hands-free inside his mouth.

We follow the 1941 King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, where sponsor Max Moore billed him as Sonny Boy Williamson to sell flour, his West Memphis years living with Howlin’ Wolf and pitching the alcohol-laced tonic Hadacol on the radio, and his recording career with Lillian McMurry’s Trumpet Records and then Chess and Checker, where he cut roughly 70 songs including Don’t Start Me Talkin’, Checkin’ Up on My Baby and Help Me. We close with his European tours backed by the Animals and the Yardbirds, his return to King Biscuit Time, and his death in a Helena rooming house on May 25, 1965.

• Why age equaled authenticity in the early blues world, and how sharecropping made music a getaway car
• How decentralized 1940s radio let two Sonny Boy Williamsons coexist without either knowing about the other
• The mentorship and mockery of Howlin’ Wolf, whom Miller taught harmonica and then parodied on the record Like Wolf
• A harmonica style built on negative space, rhythmic breathing and perfectly timed blasts between the vocals
• The bowler hat, two-tone London suit and attache case of harmonicas, plus a gravestone with the wrong date of death