Buddy Guy was born in 1936 to sharecropping parents in Lettsworth, Louisiana, picking cotton for $2.50 per hundred pounds and coaxing his first notes from a diddley bow made of baling wire and a glass bottle. This episode traces his path from working as a custodian at Louisiana State University while playing Baton Rouge clubs, to his arrival in Chicago in September 1957, where he won a 1958 guitar battle against Magic Sam and Otis Rush and landed his first contract with Cobra Records. It then examines the frustrating Chess Records years from 1959 to 1968, when Leonard Chess dismissed his blistering style as just making noise, relegated him to session work behind Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and left him driving a tow truck as late as 1967.

The conversation explores how a promise to his mother about a polka dot Cadillac became the story be ...