Alberta Hunter spent twenty years as a hospital nurse before a mandatory retirement at what her paperwork said was age 70 pushed her out the door. She was actually 82, and soon she was performing at a Greenwich Village nightclub and signing with Columbia Records. This episode traces how a girl who fled Memphis for Chicago alone at age 11 went from peeling potatoes in a boarding house to singing with King Oliver's band at the Dreamland Cafe, improvising verses on the spot to hold the crowd at the Panama Club.

Along the way we examine the business betrayal behind Down Hearted Blues, which Hunter co-wrote with Lovie Austin and which earned her just $368 after Bessie Smith's version sold nearly a million copies, and the pseudonyms she used to record for competing labels. We follow her to London, where she appeared opposite Paul Robeson in Showb ...