E9576 - Floyd Jones: Maxwell Street, Stockyard Blues and On the Road Again

Floyd Jones wrote a song that Canned Heat carried into the Billboard top 10 in 1968, yet when he died in 1989 the Chicago Tribune noted how little attention his passing received. This episode traces the bluesman from his birth in Marianna, Arkansas in July 1917 through an itinerant life in the Delta, where Howlin' Wolf handed him a guitar, to his 1945 arrival in Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Locked out of union venues, Jones played house parties and the open-air chaos of Maxwell Street, where running extension cords from apartment windows to cheap amplifiers accidentally created the distorted electric sound...