In 1947, at Houston’s Bronze Peacock nightclub, T-Bone Walker fell violently ill backstage while a restless crowd that had been drinking for hours waited for the king of electric blues guitar. An unknown twenty-something raised in Orange, Texas jumped on stage, picked up Walker’s own guitar and improvised a song on the spot that he called Gatemouth Boogie. Club owner Don Robey was watching from the back of the room, and by 1949 he had launched Peacock Records specifically to showcase Clarence Gatemouth Brown. This episode traces how a kid born in Vinton, Louisiana and raised on the Texas-Louisiana border, playing fiddle by age five and guitar by ten, spent six decades refusing to let the music industry sort him into a single racial or stylistic category.

From the horn-like guitar attack of his 1954 instrumental Okie Dokie Stomp to the fiddle-driven Just Before Dawn in 1959, Brown blended blues, country, jazz, Cajun music and rhythm and blues while distributors struggled to figure out which rack he belonged on. He recorded country singles in Nashville, appeared on Hee Haw through his friendship with Roy Clark, served as musical director for the rhythm and blues TV show The Beat, and even worked as a deputy sheriff in New Mexico. In the 1970s he toured Europe twelve times, recorded with Professor Longhair, and in 1979 played a six-week, 44-concert tour of the Soviet Union brokered by manager Jim Halsey. A Grammy for the 1981 album Alright Again, eight W.C. Handy Awards and a 1999 Blues Hall of Fame induction followed before Hurricane Katrina destroyed his Slidell, Louisiana home and pushed him back to Orange, Texas, where he died on September 10, 2005 at 81.

• How his father’s string band and the Texas-Louisiana border shaped a multi-instrumentalist fluent in blues, country, jazz and Cajun music
• Why Don Robey built Peacock Records around one unproven artist, and the 1949 hit Mary Is Fine
• The staccato picking that let Brown’s guitar cut through a horn section on Okie Dokie Stomp
• Nashville, Hee Haw, a deputy sheriff’s badge and twelve European tours in a single restless career
• The 1979 Soviet Union tour, his influence on Frank Zappa and Albert Collins, and the Katrina evacuation that brought him home