In a 1940s juvenile courtroom, a young boy charged with stealing a harmonica from a pawn shop answered the judge by picking it up and playing. The performance was so moving that the judge reached into his own pocket, paid the 50 cents the boy had been short, and dismissed the case. That boy was Amos Wells Blakemore Jr., the future Junior Wells. This episode follows him from Memphis and West Memphis, Arkansas, where his cousin was Junior Parker and he received tutelage from Sonny Boy Williamson II, playing proficiently by age seven, to a pillar role in the Chicago blues scene.

We recount the week he spent hauling glass bottles on a soda truck to earn a two-dollar harmonica, the 1948 move north during the Great Migration, and his work with the Aces, where he developed a heavily amplified style by cupping a dispatch-radio microphone and overdr ...