In the early 1930s, a 17-year-old in the Mississippi Delta sold his family's last working horse for $15, gave half to the grandmother who raised him, and spent the remaining $7.50 on a mail-order guitar from the Sears Roebuck catalog. That gamble by McKinley Morganfield, nicknamed Muddy by his grandmother Della Grant for playing in a nearby creek, altered the trajectory of global culture. His conservatory was the local Baptist church, where he absorbed the trembling, emotional vocal style he would pour into secular blues. In 1941, Alan Lomax and John W. Work III hauled a battery-powered disc-cutting machine into his home on the Stovall plantation for the Library of Congress, and hearing his own record on a jukebox convinced him he belonged in the industry.

This episode follows Muddy Waters to Chicago in 1943, where the sheer noise of South  ...