Born Ioannis Alexandros Veliotes to Greek immigrants in California, Johnny Otis grew up around his father’s grocery store in a predominantly Black Berkeley neighborhood and made a deliberate, lifelong choice to live within Black culture. This episode explores how that choice produced the godfather of rhythm and blues, a bandleader, producer, talent scout, DJ, author, politician, and preacher whose life doubles as a front-row seat to the birth of rock and roll.

We cover the forged credit slip that bought his first drum set, his 1941 marriage to Phyllis Walker when the couple had to elope to Reno, the big-band hit “Harlem Nocturne,” and the 1947 Barrelhouse Club in Watts where shrinking a swing orchestra to a hard-driving rhythm section helped invent the rhythm and blues sound. We look at his discoveries of Little Esther Phillips, Jackie Wilson, Hank Ballard, and a 13-year-old Etta James, the Big Mama Thornton “Hound Dog” session he produced and drummed on, and the court ruling that erased his co-writing credit because Leiber and Stoller were minors when they signed.

• How the clave rhythm locked into a blues shuffle to create the first rhythm and blues mambo and later “Willie and the Hand Jive”
• Why he founded the Blues Spectrum label to record aging pioneers like Big Joe Turner and Charles Brown
• Frank Zappa’s admission that his mustache and soul patch were copied from Otis
• “Listen to the Lambs,” his run for the California State Assembly, and his argument for Black economic independence after Watts
• His final years preaching at his own gospel church and his 2012 death, three days before Etta James