Eddie Taylor was born on January 29, 1923 in Benoit, Mississippi and taught himself guitar by watching the hands of older players on porches and in juke joints around Leland. Before he ever left the Delta, he taught his friend Jimmy Reed how to play, inverting the usual hierarchy of star and sideman. This episode follows Taylor's 1948 move to Chicago, where amplification broadcast every dropped beat at deafening volume and his architectural, structure-first mind became indispensable. He reconnected with Reed as his main accompanist and anchored John Lee Hooker, Big Walter Horton and Sam Lay, frontmen famous for jumping timing and adding measures on the fly.

The conversation examines his own recordings with harmonica player Earring George Mayweather and his 1950s Vee-Jay singles Big Town Playboy and Bad Boy, local Chicago hits that never bro ...