The driving rhythms behind Elvis Presley's One Night and a scene in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman trace back to a New Orleans singer who, at the end of his career, was riding the city bus to open for performers whose careers he had made possible. Overton Amos Lemons, known as Smiley Lewis, was the first to record Blue Monday and I Hear You Knocking, only to watch Fats Domino and pop singer Gale Storm turn his originals into hits. This episode digs past the household names to the raw roots of rock and roll and the industry machinery that crushed one of its pioneers.

Born in DeQuincy, Louisiana, in 1913, Lewis lost his mother as a child, hopped a freight train alone to New Orleans in his mid-teens, boarded with a white family in the Irish Channel, and took their surname. Missing front teeth earned him the nickname Smiling, later Smiley, and  ...