Rice miller mic playing??

I think he plays thru a mic & amp or PA on "Ninety Nine", Winslow would know for sure.

http://youtu.be/L_zYWDD9B8A

Sonny Boy does sound like he's cupping a mic on a couple of his Chess recordings, Ninety-Nine being one of them, Dissatisfied being the other. Of course we don't have photos or videos from those sessions (and I'm not sure there any eyewitnesses left to comment on what they saw). But both have that compressed, highs-rolled-off sound of a cupped mic. Why those cuts and not others? I wish I knew.

There's also the instrumental released under Baby Boy Warren's name as "Chicken" (some reissues call it "Chuck-a-Luck"). Here he gets a slightly overdriven sound, though at times it's like the sound you hear on some of the 1930's records where it may be a loud harmonica awfully close to a sensitive studio mic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za08zhGLVfU

We do have lots of European live videos, where he very clearly didn't cup the mic. Both the videos and the aural evidence of most of his recordings indicate that he didn't cultivate an amplified sound. He used his hands so well that cupping would have taken away a big part of his sound.

He may have cupped situationally, where need to to be heard in live situations. What prompted him to go for that sound on the three records mentioned is an interesting question. I wonder if Ninety-Nine and Dissatisfied were recorded on the same day.