In 1947, at Houston's Bronze Peacock nightclub, T-Bone Walker fell violently ill backstage while a restless crowd that had been drinking for hours waited for the king of electric blues guitar. An unknown twenty-something raised in Orange, Texas jumped on stage, picked up Walker's own guitar and improvised a song on the spot that he called Gatemouth Boogie. Club owner Don Robey was watching from the back of the room, and by 1949 he had launched Peacock Records specifically to showcase Clarence Gatemouth Brown. This episode traces how a kid born in Vinton, Louisiana and raised on the Texas-Louisiana border, playing fiddle by age five and guitar by ten, spent six decades refusing to let the music industry sort him into a single racial or stylistic category.

From the horn-like guitar attack of his 1954 instrumental Okie Dokie Stomp to the fiddl ...