When Eddie "The Chief" Clearwater stepped onto a Chicago blues stage, he wore a full Native American headdress and held his guitar upside down, playing strictly left-handed. Neither was a gimmick. In this deep dive we trace how Edward Harrington, born January 10, 1935 in Macon, Mississippi and raised by a grandmother of part Cherokee descent, taught himself guitar at 13 with the strings inverted, developing a bright, treble-first attack no standard player could easily replicate. His earliest performances were not in juke joints but in church, singing with gospel groups, and that uplifting, driving vocabulary infused everything he later played.

We follow his 1950 arrival in Chicago at 15 as a dishwasher living with his uncle, the Reverend Houston Harrington, whose independent Atomic-H label introduced him to West Side masters Otis Rush, anot ...