In 1978, the uncredited bass player backing Otis Day and the Knights at the toga party in National Lampoon's Animal House was a young, unknown musician named Robert Cray. A few decades later he had five Grammy Awards and one of the most distinctive voices in modern blues guitar. This episode traces how a military kid born at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, and raised in Newport News, Virginia, and the Tacoma, Washington, area became the torchbearer of a genre he did not grow up inside, and how he built a bridge between the founding fathers of the blues and the 1980s pop charts.

We follow Cray from his first band, One Way Street, to seeing Albert Collins, Freddie King, and Muddy Waters live at twenty, and on to Eugene, Oregon, where he formed the Robert Cray Band and teamed with Curtis Salgado. We cover the albums Who's Been Talking, Bad  ...