One of the most swaggering tracks on Van Halen's 1978 debut was not written in a California studio. It was composed 25 years earlier by John Charles Brim, a self-taught guitarist born April 10, 1922 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, who learned by ear from scratchy shellac records of Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red. This deep dive follows Brim and his wife Grace, a drummer and harmonica player, from Indianapolis in 1941 to Chicago in 1947, where the Great Migration forced acoustic country blues to plug in and become the electric Chicago sound.

The episode explains why Chess Records recorded Ice Cream Man on May 4, 1953 and shelved it until 1968, how Brim survived by running a dry cleaning business and a record store, and how the late-1960s blues revival led Eddie Van Halen to a song that generated stadium-level royalties and later covers by David L ...