A full decade before Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Guitar Watson was doing handstands with an electric guitar, roaming out the club door and down the street on a 150-foot cable with his amp cranked to its limits. Decades later he told an interviewer he had not merely anticipated rap but invented it. This episode charts the shape-shifting life of John Watson Jr., born in Houston in 1935 to a pianist father and a singing-preacher grandfather who bought him a guitar at 11 on the condition that he never play the devil's music, a promise that snapped when his mother moved him to Los Angeles in 1950.

We follow the teenage jump blues prodigy through gigs with Amos Milburn and Chuck Higgins, his 1952 Federal Records debut as Young John Watson, the 1954 Joan Crawford Western that gave him his name, and the violent pick-less string-snapping technique he calle ...