A teenage Ray Charles once played piano in his band. He wrote the song that gave B.B. King his first hit. Decades later he co-wrote a track that Otis Redding and Carla Thomas turned into a soul classic, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named one of his standards among the 500 songs that shaped rock and roll. Yet Lowell Fulson remains one of the great blind spots of American music history. Born in March 1921 on a Choctaw reservation in Atoka, Oklahoma, with Cherokee ancestry on his father's side, Fulson lost his father as a child, was uprooted with his family, and by 18 was playing alongside Alger 'Texas' Alexander before joining the Dust Bowl migration to California.

This episode follows a six-decade career defined by adaptation. Fulson recruited Ray Charles and saxophonist Stanley Turrentine as a 19-year-old bandleader, was drafted into  ...