Eric Clapton has called him one of the most advanced guitarists on the planet and one of the most underappreciated. Clyde Vernon Landreth, known as Sonny Landreth, was born in early 1951 in Canton, Mississippi, and grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the heart of Cajun and Creole country. This episode explores how a young slide guitarist joined Clifton Chenier's Red Hot Louisiana Band as its only white member and, to survive inside a fast, syncopated zydeco groove, invented a technique that rewrote the rules of the instrument.

The conversation breaks down the mechanics: a Jim Dunlop 215 glass slide on the pinky, fingers reaching behind the slide to fret full chords, a Herco flat thumb pick combined with independent finger plucking and tapping, D'Addario strings gauged .13 to .56, and custom Stratocasters with DiMarzio and Lindy Fralin picku ...