Ivory Joe Hunter performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival and the Grand Ole Opry, was recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress as a teenager, spent a day at Graceland with Elvis Presley, and is estimated to have written around 7,000 songs. This deep dive tells the story of an East Texas musician who spent his life demolishing the walls between rhythm and blues, pop, and country, and whose given name really was Ivory Joe.

We follow him from Kirbyville, Texas and a program manager job at radio station KFDM in Beaumont to Los Angeles in 1942, where he played with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, founded his own labels, and scored the 1945 hit Blues at Sunrise. We cover his MGM years, the crossover of I Almost Lost My Mind and Since I Met You Baby, and the late-1960s country pivot that produced the album I’ve Always Been Country and a number one country cover by Sonny James.

• Why a folklorist with heavy disc-cutting gear stopped to record a Texas teenager in 1933
• The Baron of the Boogie persona and how a volatile temper protected his publishing and masters
• Elvis Presley’s recordings of I Need You So and My Wish Came True
• How the shared 12-bar DNA of R&B and country made the Nashville move a natural fit
• The Memphis comeback album with Isaac Hayes and his death from lung cancer in 1974