Drop the needle on the Beatles' Revolution in 1968 and the first thing you hear is a blistering, distorted guitar riff. That phrasing was quoted from Do Unto Others, a 1954 single by a Texas-born bluesman named Connie Curtis Crayton, better known as Pee Wee Crayton. Born in Rockdale, Texas, on December 18, 1914, Crayton migrated to Oakland, California, in 1935 and only began playing guitar seriously in his early 20s, learning the fundamentals of electric guitar directly from T-Bone Walker. Rather than imitate his teacher, he used the amplifier to make one guitar punch like a horn section while keeping a solitary Texas thumb beat alive underneath.

This episode traces how that synthesis took Blues After Hours, an instrumental, to number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1948, with the ballad I'm Still in Love with You on the B-side, why L ...