One label tried to market him as a pop star, others insisted he was a traditional bluesman, and Jet magazine requested an interview assuming he was Black. Mose Allison, born in 1927 in Tippo, Mississippi, on a farm surrounded by the Tippo Bayou, spent his childhood picking cotton and taking piano lessons, wrote his own compositions by 13, and graduated from LSU in 1952 with a degree in English and a minor in philosophy. This episode explores how that unusual mix scrambled the boundaries of jazz, blues, and pop.

The conversation follows his 1956 arrival in New York, playing with Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, and Gerry Mulligan, forming his own trio in 1958, and confusing executives at Prestige, Columbia, and Atlantic with a sound that combined sophisticated jazz harmonies, a conversational Southern drawl, and dry, ironic lyrics. It then traces his influence on the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, John Mayall, The Who’s Live at Leeds, The Clash’s Sandinista, and the Pixies’ tribute song Allison.

• Why the segregated marketing categories of mid-century record stores and radio could not accommodate a quiet, sarcastic jazz-blues songwriter
• The story of his most requested song, the 1963 penitentiary track he dropped from live shows in the 1980s because the cotton-sack world it described no longer existed
• His song about the blues police and how he used satire, rather than apology, to mock rigid cultural boundaries
• How young British rock bands borrowed his anti-establishment architecture and plugged it into a wall of amplifiers
• His 67-year marriage to Audre, life in Smithtown on Long Island, Tai Chi and history books, the 2010 album The Way of the World, a Mississippi Blues Trail marker in 2012, and the NEA Jazz Masters honor in 2013