For years James Cotton told interviewers that Sonny Boy Williamson II took him in as a nine-year-old orphan and raised him like a son. Late in life he admitted he made that part up, and the real story is better. Born in 1935 in Tunica, Mississippi to sharecroppers Hattie and Moses, both dead by the time he was nine, Cotton heard Williamson on the radio and convinced his uncle to move to West Helena, Arkansas so he could find him. Williamson gave the boy lessons and, when he left for Milwaukee, handed his entire working band to a teenager who admitted he was far too young and wild to hold it together.

This episode follows Cotton from drums to blues harp, into Howlin' Wolf's band, and to Sun Records in Memphis, where his 1954 track Cotton Crop Blues featured Pat Hare's heavily distorted power chords a decade before heavy rock. We cover his 19 ...