A decade after his peak, the man who helped invent rock and roll was knocking on suburban doors selling encyclopedias to survive. Wynonie Harris was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 24, 1915, to a 15-year-old unmarried mother, dropped out of high school in 1931, and hustled through the Great Depression as a dancer with partner Velda Shannon before singing the blues at Jim Bell’s Club Harlem. He traveled to Kansas City to study the great blues shouters Jimmy Rushing and Big Joe Turner, and by 1940 his booming, room-commanding delivery at Curtis Mosby’s nightclub in Los Angeles had earned him the nickname Mr. Blues.

This episode traces how the 1942 to 1944 musicians’ union strike and a wartime shellac embargo shaped his breakthrough with bandleader Lucky Millinder, from his April 1944 Apollo Theater debut of Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well to the delayed release that hit number one on the R&B charts for eight weeks after he had already quit the band. It then examines his 1948 cover of Roy Brown’s Good Rockin’ Tonight, where a driving backbeat and gospel-style handclaps on the off-beats created a strong contender for the first true rock and roll record, and how Elvis Presley absorbed his vocal gymnastics and hip-swinging stage moves.

• Why blues shouting was a technological necessity in noisy clubs with loud swing bands and unreliable microphones
• The $100-a-night standoff with Millinder in Texas, and how the shellac delay accidentally left Harris a free agent when his record exploded
• His run of top 10 R&B hits for King Records and the risque dirty blues jukebox favorites like Sittin’ on It All the Time, Lollipop Mama, and Keep On Churnin’
• Producer Henry Glover’s observation that Elvis was a sanitized version of Harris, and Harris’s own 1956 comments on the double standard
• His final Apollo performance in 1967, his death from cancer in Los Angeles in 1969 at age 53, his 1994 Blues Hall of Fame induction, and his song Grandma Plays the Numbers reaching new listeners through Fallout 4