William Thomas Dupree fought 107 bouts, won the Golden Gloves, survived two years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and still sat down at the piano to pound out some of the wittiest, most joyful boogie-woogie ever recorded. In this deep dive into the life of Champion Jack Dupree, we start with a birth in New Orleans that historians date anywhere from 1908 to 1910, the loss of both parents by age eight, and his placement in the Colored Waifs' Home, the same institution that had housed a young Louis Armstrong a few years earlier. There he taught himself piano, and on the streets he apprenticed under barrelhouse masters Tuts Washington and Willie Hall, who passed down the rolling melody Dupree would turn into "Junker's Blues."

We follow his nomadic years as a cook through Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit, where heavyweight champion Joe Loui ...