Theodore Roosevelt "Hound Dog" Taylor was born in Natchez, Mississippi, sometime between 1915 and 1917 with polydactyly, a rudimentary sixth finger on each hand, and one night, drunk at his kitchen table, he cut the extra digit off his right hand with a straight razor. That raw, do-it-yourself approach defined everything that followed. He played piano first and did not touch a guitar until he was 20, arrived in Chicago in 1942, and did not become a full-time musician until around 1957, spending those years busking the chaotic open-air Maxwell Street Market and packing hyperlocal South Side bars like Florence's Lounge, where the sound had to be loud and relentless enough to stop people in their tracks.

This episode digs into why cheap Japanese Teisco guitars with painfully high action were the perfect tools for his Elmore James-inspired slid ...