One label tried to market him as a pop star, others insisted he was a traditional bluesman, and Jet magazine requested an interview assuming he was Black. Mose Allison, born in 1927 in Tippo, Mississippi, on a farm surrounded by the Tippo Bayou, spent his childhood picking cotton and taking piano lessons, wrote his own compositions by 13, and graduated from LSU in 1952 with a degree in English and a minor in philosophy. This episode explores how that unusual mix scrambled the boundaries of jazz, blues, and pop.

The conversation follows his 1956 arrival in New York, playing with Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, and Gerry Mulligan, forming his own trio in 1958, and confusing executives at Prestige, Columbia, and Atlantic with a sound that combined sophisticated jazz harmonies, a conversational Southern drawl, and dry, ironic lyrics. It then tra ...