Critics compared his phrasing to Frank Sinatra and called him one of the greatest storytellers in American music, yet Bobby Blue Bland could not read or write a single lyric sheet or contract. This episode traces Robert Calvin Brooks, born in 1930 in rural Barretville, Tennessee, abandoned by his father, who left school in the third grade to work the cotton fields and moved with his mother to Memphis in 1947. On Beale Street he fell in with the Beale Streeters, a circle that included B.B. King, Johnny Ace, Rosco Gordon and Junior Parker, and built a vocal style from two opposite poles: the velvet of Nat King Cole and the fiery sermons of Detroit's Reverend C.L. Franklin, whose guttural breath-catching squall became Bland's signature.

We follow his 1951 session with Ike Turner recording They Call It Stormy Monday, his Army stint, his return  ...