In the Pottersville sequence of It’s a Wonderful Life, an uncredited extra hammers away at a piano in the background of Nick’s Bar. That extra was Anderson Meade Lewis, known as Meade Lux Lewis, one of the primary architects of the boogie-woogie craze and a foundational figure in the rhythm of early rock and roll. This episode traces his disputed 1905 birth in Chicago or Louisville, the violin lessons his guitarist father arranged, his switch to piano after his father’s death when he was 16, and the shared keyboard sessions with childhood friend Albert Ammons where a new rhythmic language was born.

We follow his 1927 Paramount debut Honky Tonk Train Blues, which he re-recorded for Parlophone, Victor and the Camel Caravan radio show over the next decade, and the 1938 From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall organized by John Hammond. We explore the boogie-woogie trio with Ammons and Pete Johnson whose Cafe Society residency helped inspire the founding of Blue Note Records in 1939, his film appearances, and his death in June 1964 when his Chrysler Imperial was rear-ended at high speed on Olson Memorial Highway near Minneapolis after a gig.

• How a comic strip called Alphonse and Gaston produced the nickname Duke of Luxembourg, shortened to Lux
• Why boogie-woogie players treated every recording as a new living snapshot rather than a final draft
• How the eight-to-the-bar left hand was adapted by swing arrangers for Tommy Dorsey and Will Bradley and later straightened into rock and roll
• Covers of Honky Tonk Train Blues by harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe, organist George Wright and prog rocker Keith Emerson
• Literary cameos in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Ross Macdonald’s The Moving Target and Keith Richards’ autobiography Life