Jimmy Dawkins spent 14 years hauling cardboard in a Chicago box factory by day and playing electric guitar in blues clubs by night before he ever made a record of his own. This episode traces James Henry Dawkins from his 1936 birth in Tchula, Mississippi, through his 1955 move north in the Great Migration, and his long apprenticeship as a session musician during the real-time invention of Chicago's West Side Sound, the fiercely urban, minor-key, heavily amplified style he helped build alongside Magic Sam and Buddy Guy.

We explain how Magic Sam leveraged his own standing with Delmark Records founder Bob Koester to get Dawkins signed, how the 1969 debut Fast Fingers won the Grand Prix du Disque from the Hot Club de France, and why Parisian jazz critics heard high art where American executives heard club music. Then comes All for Business in 1 ...