A left-handed musician picks up a standard right-handed electric guitar, flips it upside down without restringing it, and curls his pinky under the heavy low string to anchor his hand. It sounds like a recipe for a cramp, but for Otis Rush it became the foundation of a wildly influential style built on slow, crying, sustained bends. Born in 1934 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to a sharecropping family of seven children, Rush was pulled out of school to pick cotton whenever the landowners demanded it, sang in gospel choirs, taught himself guitar and harmonica on street corners, and at 14 fled north to Chicago, where he worked the stockyards and steel mills and drove a horse-drawn coal wagon by day while soaking up the South Side clubs by night.

This episode explains how the physics of his backward guitar shaped his phrasing, how he, Magic Sam ...