On a military base in the early 1940s, a soldier cupped a small harmonica against the microphone of a parade-ground public address system and blew a bugle call. The loud, raw, distorted sound that blasted out was a technological epiphany that helped birth the electric, overdriven sound of Chicago blues harmonica. That soldier was James Edward Pryor, known as Snooky Pryor. This episode traces his journey from the acoustic Mississippi Delta to the Maxwell Street Market, his bitterly disputed claim to have invented the cupped-microphone technique, and a career that involved walking away from music entirely before a triumphant late-life comeback.

Born in Lambert, Mississippi, in 1919 or 1921, Pryor absorbed the vocabulary of both Sonny Boy Williamsons and jammed around Vance, Mississippi, in the mid-1930s alongside a young Jimmy Rogers who had  ...