Sadly, there's not one American in a hundred who know who that is, even if you were playing one of his warhorses as a hint.
For the boomers “all music history” viewed backwards ends at the Beatles arrival in the U.S. in 1964. As you well know, the British groups were by age pre-boomers, “war children” as Van Morrison put it, and when they revealed their own influences, the boomers, led by the Rolling Stone magazine, started “discovering” people like Roy Orbison, for example, whose career pretty much died in 1965.