John Thurman Hunter Jr. was working in a Beaumont, Texas box factory when he saw B.B. King perform, bought his first guitar, and in that same year of 1953 released a single on Duke Records as Long John Hunter. This episode explains how that seemingly impossible timeline made sense in the raw, volume-driven R&B market run by Don Robey, and follows Hunter from his birth on July 13, 1931 in Ringgold, Louisiana and a farm childhood in Magnolia, Arkansas to the move that defined his sound: relocating to El Paso in 1957 and taking a residency at the Lobby Club in Ciudad Juarez that lasted more than 13 years.

We look at how nightly sets for GIs, tourists and locals forged Hunter's piercing amplified tone and the cross-border swagger of his instrumental El Paso Rock, and why geographic isolation kept him a regional secret for decades. The break ...