By day he hammered dents out of car panels in a garage; by night he cupped a harmonica against a microphone and unleashed a sound that polite 1950s Britain had never heard. Cyril Davies, born in Buckinghamshire in 1932, started out playing banjo and 12-string guitar in a skiffle band until hearing Little Walter's amplified Chicago blues harmonica rewired his musical identity. Around 1955 he teamed up with Alexis Korner to open the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, where they hosted touring American legends like Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry, and Memphis Slim by piggybacking on Chris Barber's jazz network.

This episode explains why British jazz and folk purists treated a simple amplifier as a vulgar, Americanized threat, and how that hostility pushed Davies and Korner to form Blues Incorporated and open the Ealing Club in a damp basement beneat ...