A teenager expelled from a theological seminary for playing ragtime piano went on to build the rhythmic engine of boogie-woogie and, decades later, the sound that unlocked Ray Charles. Charles Edward Davenport was born in Anniston, Alabama, in 1894, one of eight children, and started playing piano around age twelve over the objections of a father who sent him to seminary to cleanse the urge. After his expulsion he joined a traveling carnival, learning to play loud enough to compete with barkers and rides, then moved into vaudeville as an accompanist for singers Dora Carr and Ivy Smith, recording for Vocalion and working as a talent scout alongside figures like Tampa Red.

This episode breaks down Cow Cow Blues, named for the cowcatcher on a steam locomotive, and how its rolling eight-to-the-bar left hand became the blueprint for boogie-woogie and the foundation of Mess Around, the 1953 song Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun built for Ray Charles. It also covers Davenport’s recording aliases, his claims to have written Mama Don’t Allow It and I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You before selling the rights, the Hollywood hit Cow Cow Boogie that borrowed his name for a 1942 Abbott and Costello film, the 1938 stroke that took the use of his hands, his rediscovery washing dishes by pianist Art Hodes, and his death in Cleveland in December 1955.

• Why syncopated ragtime in a seminary sounded like defiance and why music meant survival in the Jim Crow South
• Recording as Bat the Hummingbird, George Hamilton, and the Georgia Grinder to work around exclusive flat-fee contracts
• How the cowcatcher bass line pushed Ray Charles out of his Nat King Cole crooning phase
• Selling songwriting credit for survival cash and being erased from major hits as a result
• Art Hodes’ intervention, Davenport’s rehabilitation and return to recording, and his Alabama Music Hall of Fame induction