When Edwin Joseph Bocage, known as Eddie Bo, died of a heart attack in Picayune, Mississippi in 2009 at 78, his body was cremated almost immediately on the order of a woman claiming to be his sister, a stranger to his actual siblings. It was a bizarre final chapter for a man who released more singles than anyone in New Orleans history except Fats Domino. This episode frames Bo as a master builder in two senses: he came from generations of Algiers shipbuilders, bricklayers, carpenters and masons who played music by night, with a mother who played piano by ear in the Professor Longhair style and cousins who had worked with Sidney Bechet. After Booker T. Washington High School and the Army, he studied theory, sight reading and arranging at the Grunwald School of Music while idolizing Vladimir Horowitz and Art Tatum.

Bo pragmatically pivoted from jazz to R&B, playing the Dew Drop Inn and Club Tijuana as Spider Bocage and leading the Spider Bocage Orchestra behind Big Joe Turner, Guitar Slim, The Platters and Lloyd Price. The hosts explain how aliases protected him from predatory contracts, and how his 1956 song I’m Wise became Little Richard’s Slippin’ and Slidin’ and his co-written My Dearest Darling became an Etta James hit in 1960. He worked with more than 40 labels, produced Irma Thomas, Art Neville and Johnny Adams, and finally stepped into the spotlight with the 1969 funk masterpiece Hook and Sling, recorded in one take, which reached number 13 on the R&B chart and whose drum break has been sampled from Ultimate Breaks and Beats to Phantogram. The episode closes with his Bo-Sound label and Check Your Bucket, his return to construction, building a studio for Ric Records, a 1997 Eddie Bo Day proclaimed while he was in Karachi, and his decision in his mid-70s to personally rebuild his home, studio and eatery after Hurricane Katrina.

• The cremation mystery and why a stranger could not erase a legacy built into the city itself
• Classical finger independence meets New Orleans rumba-boogie: the training behind the Spider Bocage sound
• Aliases as survival strategy, and the hits that made stars of Little Richard and Etta James
• How Hook and Sling was arranged so precisely it was cut in a single take, then powered hip hop drum breaks
• Trowel and hammer in his 70s: rebuilding his studio and Check Your Bucket after Katrina