In the late 1920s, a 12-year-old with a penciled-on mustache and his father's oversized fedora tended bar in Kansas City nightclubs while singing over a dozen blaring brass instruments. That kid was Big Joe Turner, and this episode argues that following his life traces the mechanical blueprint of American rock and roll. From the Kingfish Club and Piney Brown's Sunset, where police raids were so routine that bosses signed bail papers in advance, Turner developed the blues shouter style that let a human voice cut through a boogie-woogie piano and a full band.

We follow Turner and pianist Pete Johnson from a failed 1936 trip to New York to their triumph at John Hammond's From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and the hit Roll 'Em Pete. The episode explains why his restless 1940s made sense in an industry shifting from big ba ...