Picture being born on a quiet, isolated tenant farm in Mississippi in the early 1900s, where the soundtrack is wind, hand tools, and an acoustic guitar on a porch, and then standing decades later in a packed South Side Chicago club shaking with amplified guitars and booming vocals. Albert Luandrew, known as Sunnyland Slim, was the engine of that transformation. This episode explores how one life served as the essential bridge from rural acoustic Delta blues to the invention of electrified Chicago blues and on to the rock stars of the 1960s.

Born near Vance in Quitman County, Mississippi, on September 5, 1906, Luandrew left for Memphis in 1925, honed his piano on the Beale Street scene, and took his stage name from a song about the Sunnyland Train, a real Memphis-to-St. Louis railroad line that symbolized escape and mobility. Joining the Gre ...