Paul Butterfield grew up in Chicago's academic Hyde Park neighborhood in the 1950s, the son of a lawyer and a painter, studying flute with a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and holding an Ivy League track scholarship offer from Brown University. Then a severe knee injury ended his athletic career, and he and friend Nick Gravenites began crossing the color lines of a deeply segregated city into the South Side blues clubs of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Otis Rush. This episode examines how a classically trained kid, armed with breath control and a pistol in his pocket, mastered the harmonica in six months.

We follow the formation of one of America's first racially integrated blues bands after he poached bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay from Howlin' Wolf, producer Paul Rothchild's push to add guitarist Mike Bloomfield, the  ...