The man who built the bridge between Dixieland and big band swing moved to New York in 1920 to become a chemist. This episode follows Fletcher Henderson from Cuthbert, Georgia, where his father, a normal school principal, locked him in a room to practice piano, through a chemistry and mathematics degree at Atlanta University, a lab assistant job in Manhattan, and the sick roommate whose riverboat gig he covered, launching a career that made him musical director of Black Swan Records.

We trace the Roseland Ballroom residency, Louis Armstrong's October 1924 debut with the orchestra and the culture clash that followed, and how Henderson and arranger Don Redman formalized Armstrong's feel into a sectional call-and-response blueprint for swing. We then cover the talent that passed through the band, the 1928 car accident, financial collapse after ...