Hit the Road Jack is one of the most recognizable upbeat anthems in American music, but the man who wrote it never sang from a place of swagger. This episode traces the life of Percy Mayfield, the songwriter his peers called the poet laureate of the blues. Born in Louisiana in 1920 with an early gift for poetry, Mayfield moved to Los Angeles in 1942, recorded Two Years of Torture for Swingtime Records in 1947, and refused to water down his gentle blues ballads for the crossover pop market. After moving to Specialty Records, his 1950 single Please Send Me Someone to Love went to number one on the R&B charts, launched a string of six top 10 hits including Lost Love and The Big Question, and put him on the 1951 Cavalcade of Jazz bill at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles alongside Billy Eckstine, Lionel Hampton and Jimmy Witherspoon.

In 1952, riding home from a Las Vegas performance in a chauffeur-driven car, Mayfield was in a crash so severe he was pronounced dead at the scene. He survived, but two years of convalescence and a permanent facial disfigurement ended his career as a frontline star. His pen did not stop. In 1961 he wrote Hit the Road Jack, and Ray Charles signed him to Tangerine Records on a five-year contract as his exclusive private songwriter, recording at least 15 Mayfield compositions including Danger Zone, Hide Nor Hair and At the Club. We follow his 1963 minor hit with a remake of River’s Invitation, his later work with Atlantic Records and Johnny Guitar Watson, his quiet years in the East Bay before keyboardist Mark Naftalin sought him out, the 1982 album Hit the Road Again, a documentary in which B.B. King and Ray Charles testified to his genius, and his death in Los Angeles on August 11, 1984, one day before his 64th birthday.

• How a childhood love of poetry shaped Mayfield’s approach, with the words dictating the music rather than the stage act
• Why Please Send Me Someone to Love stood apart as a vulnerable, universal lament in an era of male bravado
• The 1952 highway crash that ended his career as a frontline idol and forced his art to take a new form
• The unusual Tangerine Records arrangement that made Mayfield the private songwriter behind a run of Ray Charles recordings
• Little Richard singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at the funeral of the man who wrote the words legends wished they had thought of