In the summer of 1914, a teenage soda jerk who could not yet read music composed a single tune by ear and disguised it as a one-step, a waltz, a tango and a foxtrot so cafe customers thought he had an endless repertoire. That resourceful kid was Edward Kennedy Ellington. This episode charts his path from a middle-class Washington, D.C. household where his mother played parlor songs and his Navy blueprint-maker father preferred opera, through the elegance and racial pride his mother Daisy instilled as armor against Jim Crow, to the pool room where ragtime pianists finally made him fall in love with the piano he had been skipping lessons on.

We follow his street-level education, including watching Atlantic City pianists read sheet music upside down, his sign-painting business that doubled as a booking agency, the discouraging early years hust ...