Willie Lee Perryman, known as Piano Red and later Dr. Feelgood, was a visually impaired Black man in Jim Crow Atlanta who could not read sheet music, taught himself piano by ear, and worked days as a furniture upholsterer. Decades later, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton were making pilgrimages to see him play in an underground Atlanta saloon. This episode maps how a self-taught barrelhouse pianist became the first blues musician to cross over onto the mainstream pop charts.

Born in 1911 to sharecroppers near Hampton, Georgia, Perryman and his older brother Rufus, who recorded as Speckled Red, were both born with albinism. We debunk the myth that Rufus taught him, trace his real education through Fats Waller records and rent parties, and explain how the pounding barrelhouse style was an engineering solution to una ...