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 caree ...