Eubie Blake threw the party of the century for his 100th birthday, passed away five days later, and turned out to have been 96. That fabricated four-year gap says everything about the showmanship of a man whose life stretched from the aftermath of the Civil War to Saturday Night Live. Born in Baltimore in 1887 to formerly enslaved parents, he wandered into a music store at four or five, climbed onto a pump organ, and played well enough that the manager called him a prodigy. His stevedore father and his mother bought that $75 organ at 25 cents a week, and church organist Margaret Marshall gave him lessons at seven. By 15 he was secretly playing piano in Aggie Shelton's bordello, and by 1907 he was at boxer Joe Gans's Goldfield Hotel, Baltimore's first black-and-tan club.

This episode follows Blake from vaudeville with James Reese Europe's So ...