In the late 1920s, a 12-year-old with a penciled-on mustache and his father’s oversized fedora tended bar in Kansas City nightclubs while singing over a dozen blaring brass instruments. That kid was Big Joe Turner, and this episode argues that following his life traces the mechanical blueprint of American rock and roll. From the Kingfish Club and Piney Brown’s Sunset, where police raids were so routine that bosses signed bail papers in advance, Turner developed the blues shouter style that let a human voice cut through a boogie-woogie piano and a full band.

We follow Turner and pianist Pete Johnson from a failed 1936 trip to New York to their triumph at John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and the hit Roll ‘Em Pete. The episode explains why his restless 1940s made sense in an industry shifting from big bands to jump blues, how the Ertegun brothers signed him to Atlantic Records after hearing him at the Apollo in 1951, and how Shake, Rattle and Roll in 1954 bridged rhythm and blues and rock and roll despite radio stations refusing to play it.

• What a blues shouter actually does with the diaphragm to project over brass without shredding the vocal cords
• The 1944 Soundies films that used Turner’s voice while a comedian named Dudley Dickerson lip-synced on camera
• How Bill Haley’s sanitized cover eclipsed the original yet sent teenagers searching for Turner’s Atlantic singles, and Haley’s 1966 gesture of lending him the Comets
• His late-career return to small jazz combos, European tours with Count Basie’s orchestra, and mentorship of Dave and Phil Alvin of the Blasters
• His 1983 Blues Hall of Fame induction, his death from heart failure in Inglewood in November 1985 at 74, and his 1987 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame