Eubie Blake threw the party of the century for his 100th birthday, passed away five days later, and turned out to have been 96. That fabricated four-year gap says everything about the showmanship of a man whose life stretched from the aftermath of the Civil War to Saturday Night Live. Born in Baltimore in 1887 to formerly enslaved parents, he wandered into a music store at four or five, climbed onto a pump organ, and played well enough that the manager called him a prodigy. His stevedore father and his mother bought that $75 organ at 25 cents a week, and church organist Margaret Marshall gave him lessons at seven. By 15 he was secretly playing piano in Aggie Shelton’s bordello, and by 1907 he was at boxer Joe Gans’s Goldfield Hotel, Baltimore’s first black-and-tan club.

This episode follows Blake from vaudeville with James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra to the partnership with Noble Sissle that produced Shuffle Along in 1921, the first hit Broadway musical written by and about African Americans, which ran 504 performances and launched I’m Just Wild About Harry. It covers early sound-on-film experiments with Lee De Forest, the Depression’s collapse of his touring act, the death of his first wife Avis, USO bandleading in World War II, enrolling at NYU at nearly 60 to study the Schillinger system, and the ragtime revival that made him a Tonight Show regular, the subject of the 1978 Broadway revue Eubie, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient in 1981.

• How he carried the Charleston Rag in his head from age 12 in 1899 until he learned notation in 1915
• What syncopation actually does with the listener’s expectations
• Shuffle Along as the Hamilton of the 1920s, and Rudolph Fisher’s critique of what it did to Harlem
• Why going back to school at 60 was empowerment, not imposter syndrome
• The famous line about taking better care of himself, and the masterpieces lost when geniuses never learned to write them down