For 25 years Jimmy Yancey raked dirt and painted baselines as a groundskeeper for the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park. He also pioneered the boogie-woogie piano style, played Carnegie Hall in 1948, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 in the same class as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. This episode unpacks how a man who refused to enter a recording studio for decades still shaped the sound of modern music.

We start with the tangled record of his birth year, weighing a 1913 passport application he signed against an unsigned 1919 draft card, and discover a child vaudeville singer and tap dancer touring America by age 10 and Europe by 20, with engagements booked in Russia. The conversation explains how tap dancing's polyrhythmic limb independence shaped the famous Yancey bass, why his quiet, nuanced righ ...