Michael Burks was born in Milwaukee in 1957 into three generations of blues: a grandfather who played Delta blues and a father, Frederick Burks, who played bass alongside Sonny Boy Williamson II. He had a guitar in his hands by age five, and in the early 1970s, after the family moved to Camden, Arkansas, he and his father built a 300-seat juke joint by hand, the Bradley Ferry Country Club, where Michael led the house band as a teenager through marathon sets for timber workers and laborers. When the club closed in the mid-1980s, he took a job as an aerospace mechanic at Lockheed Martin and spent years turning wrenches by day while playing regional gigs at night.

This episode makes the case that those years were not a detour but the required curriculum. Burks released his debut, From the Inside Out, on the independent Vent Records in 1997 at  ...