John Lee Hooker was celebrated with a year-long 100th birthday party in 2017, but census records from 1920 and 1930 suggest the guest of honor was actually born in 1912 and turning 105. That mystery is a fitting opening for a bluesman who recorded under a dozen names and played by his own internal clock. This episode traces his path from a strict Mississippi sharecropping household, where only religious music was allowed, to a stepfather named William Moore who brought a droning one-chord Louisiana blues style into the home, to running away at 14 and surviving on Beale Street in Memphis.

We follow Hooker to wartime Detroit, where a job at Ford and a club scene dominated by loud piano players pushed him to electrify his hypnotic boogie. Producer Bernie Besman miked a wooden shipping pallet under his stomping foot to capture Boogie Chillen, t ...