Eddie Boyd was born in November 1914 on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta, either Stovall's near Clarksdale or Frank Moore's next door, and even his name is uncertain: officially Edward Riley Boyd, possibly Will Joe Boyd Jr. Influenced by the driving piano of Leroy Carr and Roosevelt Sykes, he played Beale Street in Memphis with the Dixie Rhythm Boys in the 1930s before joining the Great Migration to Chicago in 1941. This episode explains how the noise of packed northern clubs forced the blues to electrify, and how Boyd spent the 1940s as a Bluebird Records sideman behind Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Tampa Red and Jazz Gillum, learning the studio system from the inside.

The conversation centers on 1952, when Boyd financed and produced his own demo recordings and took them to Joe Brown at J.O.B. Records, resulting in Five Long Yea ...