E9577 - Long John Hunter: From a Beaumont Box Factory to Border Town Blues Legend

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...