In the mid-1990s, Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, and members of U2 skipped the arenas and drove into rural Mississippi to squeeze into a sweaty converted church and watch a man in his sixties, who had just released his debut album, play guitar from a folding chair. This episode explores the life of David Malone Kimbrough Jr., known as Junior Kimbrough, the father of 36 children and the accidental inventor of a hypnotic, trance-like strain of the blues.

We leave Chicago and the Delta behind for the isolated Mississippi Hill Country, where Kimbrough absorbed Fred McDowell and Eli Green and mutated their sound into one-chord, modal, polyrhythmic grooves that scholars trace to West African traditions. We follow the 1966 Goldwax session in Memphis that producer Quinton Claunch shelved as too country until 2009, the 1967 Philwood single that misspelle ...