Picture the smoothest blues pianist in a dimly lit Los Angeles nightclub, the artist who influenced Ray Charles and defined the sophisticated sound of Central Avenue. Now picture the same man a few years earlier teaching high school chemistry and handling mustard gas at a military arsenal. This episode follows Charles Brown, born Tony Russell Brown in Texas City, Texas in 1922, who lost his mother shortly after birth and was raised by grandparents who gave him classical piano training. He graduated high school in Galveston in 1939, earned a chemistry degree from Prairie View A&M in 1942, taught in Baytown, worked at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas and apprenticed as an electrician in a Richmond, California shipyard before settling in Los Angeles in 1943.

When Nat King Cole left town on tour, Brown filled the vacuum with Johnny Moore' ...