Big Walter Horton was so shy his peers nicknamed him Mumbles, yet when he raised a harmonica to his lips the sound was so bold that Willie Dixon called him the best he had ever heard. This episode traces how a kid from Horn Lake, Mississippi, born in 1921 and out of school by age seven, went from blowing into discarded tin cans on a porch to shaping the modern Chicago blues sound, largely from the shadows as a perpetual sideman.

We follow his verifiable 1939 debut backing Little Buddy Doyle in Memphis, the lost decade of the 1940s spent as a cook, undertaker, and ice hauler while he perfected his tongue-blocking technique and taught James Cotton and Little Walter, and his 1952 arrival in Chicago. The episode covers his short tenure in Muddy Waters's band, the 1953 Sun Studio session with Sam Phillips that produced Easy, his celebrated 1956  ...