Mose Allison started on playing the piano by ear at age five, picking out tunes from the local jukebox before going on to formal lessons, played trumpet in high school marching and dance bands, and had written his first song by age thirteen. His own influences were rather straightforward. Louis Jordan, Nat "King" Cole, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Waller, the piano stylings of the likes of Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade "Lux" Lewis and Percy Mayfield's songwriting.
After stints in college and the Army, a professional gig in Lake Charles, LA, paid his way through Louisiana State University, and he graduated in 1952 with a Bachelor's degree majoring in English with a fair strand of Philosophy for good measure. That probably comes out in the songwriting.
After working nightclubs throughout the American South and West, he moved to New York in 1956, landing a recording contract with Prestige Records, playing and recording with the likes of Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan, and Phil Woods. He formed his own Mose Allison Trio in 1958. Surprisingly, given the songwriting, the early albums were mainly instrumental affairs, with 1963's Mose Allison Sings being his first all-vocal album. It was largely covers (Sonny Boy Williamson's "Eyesight to the Blind," Jimmy Rogers' "That's All Right" and Willie Dixon's "The Seventh Son" it did include his own "Parchman Farm," possibly the track that brought him to the attention of the British R&B crowd in the mid-sixties. It turned up in all sorts of settings, as did "I'm Not Talking" (The Yardbirds and The Misunderstood) and "Young Man Blues" (The Who).
Still, despite the flow of albums through to the early nineties, he was never a household name, an influence and a cult figure rather than a headliner.
But then, with that wry conversational delivery, understated laconic approach and sharp sense of humour superstar status was never likely.