On stage he was a 275-pound, six-foot-three force of nature who crawled across the boards and had to be revived by paramedics after his final show. Off stage he sat in a Pontiac station wagon balancing a ledger so his band members had health insurance and Social Security contributions. This episode traces how Chester Arthur Burnett, born in Mississippi in 1910, survived being thrown out into the winter cold by his mother, brutal abuse by his great-uncle Will Young and a barefoot 85-mile walk to his father's house, then forged that trauma into the identity of Howlin' Wolf.

We follow his first guitar in 1928, his apprenticeship watching Charlie Patton's showmanship, the failed Jimmie Rodgers yodel that became his trademark howl, and a traumatic Army stint that ended in a mental hospital in 1943. Then comes the 1951 discovery by Ike Turner, se ...