By day a teenager playing piano for her Baptist church choir in Newark; by night sneaking into nightclubs to sing jazz. This episode follows Sarah Vaughan from an 18-year-old at the Apollo Theater's Amateur Night, where she won first prize singing Body and Soul and earned a week opening for Ella Fitzgerald, to Earl Hines hiring her as a pianist to sidestep union rules, placing her alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as bebop was being born.

We examine the nickname Sassy, the image overhaul imposed by manager and husband George Treadwell, the frustration of Columbia's pop material, the dual Mercury and EmArcy contract that let her fund pure jazz with commercial hits, and the financial collapse that followed her divorces. We then trace her 1970s reinvention with Marshall Fisher, the symphony concerts that reframed her as an American  ...