James "Super Chikan" Johnson is not your typical blues musician, or really your typical anything.

He's a left-handed guitarist who taught himself to play on a right-handed guitar. He makes instruments out of gas cans and ceiling fans. And he communicates with chickens.

(Listen to this interview here.) 

The song is "Mannish Boy." Bo Diddley wrote it, Muddy Waters adapted and adopted it, and now a supergroup from the Los Angeles blues scene has taken it as their name.

The song as Muddy does it has a deep Delta groove with Chicago blues instrumentation, and Muddy sings it as a high-energy shaman would, full of boast and swagger: "I'm a man / I spell M-A-N / That represent man / No B-O-Y / That mean mannish boy." A Big City Rhythm & Blues review of the Mannish Boys' first CD, 2004's That Represent Man, notes that "The Mannish Boys had better deliver with so audacious a name, lest the memory of Muddy Waters and a handful of other blues greats from the same era be slandered. Remarkably, this band manages to earn the right to call themselves anything they like."

(Listen to the interview here.) 

"I've been around it all my life," Calvin Cooke said in a phone interview when asked how he learned to play steel guitar.

He grew up immersed in a Pentecostal culture, where he heard bands in church playing lap-steel guitar, lead guitar, and drums. Starting on regular guitar at an early age, Calvin's hands were too small to go around the instrument's neck, so he played it on his lap like a steel guitar, using the back of a knife for a slide. "Then when my mother realized I really wasn't going to play the lead guitar, she went to the pawn shop and got me an old steel guitar ... and she started teaching me by ear. ... That was back in the '50s. I got better and better, and then my cousin learned the lead guitar and we would play together" in church.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Chris Thomas King plays the young blues musician Tommy Johnson, who sells his soul to the devil for the chance to become a legendary guitar player.

"Oh, son," says Tommy's new acquaintance, Delmar, upon learning of the deal. "For that you sold your everlasting soul?"

"Well," replies Tommy, "I wasn't usin' it."

Obviously, King wasn't being typecast in the role. King's musical accomplishments reveal nothing but soul.