Critics compared his phrasing to Frank Sinatra and called him one of the greatest storytellers in American music, yet Bobby Blue Bland could not read or write a single lyric sheet or contract. This episode traces Robert Calvin Brooks, born in 1930 in rural Barretville, Tennessee, abandoned by his father, who left school in the third grade to work the cotton fields and moved with his mother to Memphis in 1947. On Beale Street he fell in with the Beale Streeters, a circle that included B.B. King, Johnny Ace, Rosco Gordon and Junior Parker, and built a vocal style from two opposite poles: the velvet of Nat King Cole and the fiery sermons of Detroit’s Reverend C.L. Franklin, whose guttural breath-catching squall became Bland’s signature.

We follow his 1951 session with Ike Turner recording They Call It Stormy Monday, his Army stint, his return in 1954 to find his friends had become stars, and his humbling job as valet and driver for Junior Parker on the Chitlin’ Circuit. At Duke Records, Don Robey guided the illiterate singer’s hand to sign a contract paying half a cent per record against an industry standard of two cents, yet with arranger Joe Scott and bandleader Bill Harvey, Bland created a brass-heavy new sound and 23 top 10 R&B hits, including Farther Up the Road, I Pity the Fool and Turn On Your Love Light. The story runs through the 1968 breakup of his band, depression and alcohol, sobriety in 1971, the ABC Records era that produced Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City, his 1985 move to Malaco Records and the anthem Members Only, and his death in 2013 at 83.

• How a preacher’s breathing technique became one of the most recognizable growls in rhythm and blues
• Communicating complex horn arrangements to Joe Scott without reading music or playing an instrument
• Why his pop chart ceiling was number 20 in 1964, the year the Beatles held the top five spots
• The afterlife of Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City with Whitesnake, Kanye West and Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, and The Lincoln Lawyer
• The posthumous revelation that harmonica legend James Cotton was his half-brother, and his 1992 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction