A decade after his peak, the man who helped invent rock and roll was knocking on suburban doors selling encyclopedias to survive. Wynonie Harris was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 24, 1915, to a 15-year-old unmarried mother, dropped out of high school in 1931, and hustled through the Great Depression as a dancer with partner Velda Shannon before singing the blues at Jim Bell's Club Harlem. He traveled to Kansas City to study the great blues shouters Jimmy Rushing and Big Joe Turner, and by 1940 his booming, room-commanding delivery at Curtis Mosby's nightclub in Los Angeles had earned him the nickname Mr. Blues.

This episode traces how the 1942 to 1944 musicians' union strike and a wartime shellac embargo shaped his breakthrough with bandleader Lucky Millinder, from his April 1944 Apollo Theater debut of Who Threw the Whiskey in the Wel ...