When Edwin Joseph Bocage, known as Eddie Bo, died of a heart attack in Picayune, Mississippi in 2009 at 78, his body was cremated almost immediately on the order of a woman claiming to be his sister, a stranger to his actual siblings. It was a bizarre final chapter for a man who released more singles than anyone in New Orleans history except Fats Domino. This episode frames Bo as a master builder in two senses: he came from generations of Algiers shipbuilders, bricklayers, carpenters and masons who played music by night, with a mother who played piano by ear in the Professor Longhair style and cousins who had worked with Sidney Bechet. After Booker T. Washington High School and the Army, he studied theory, sight reading and arranging at the Grunwald School of Music while idolizing Vladimir Horowitz and Art Tatum.

Bo pragmatically pivoted fr ...