In 1971 one of the biggest hits on the national R&B chart was produced, owned and controlled by a Black woman who had picked cotton in rural Mississippi a few decades earlier. This episode follows Denise LaSalle from her birth in July 1934 in LeFlore County, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers, through gospel choirs in Belzoni and a move to Chicago at 13 in the middle of the Great Migration. Working as a barmaid at Mix Lounge, she met Chess Records scout Billy The Kid Emerson, signed a one-year contract, and was shelved without recording a single session, a lesson she turned into a business philosophy.

After her 1967 regional hit A Love Reputation on the Tarpon label, she and husband Bill Jones formed the production company Crajon in 1969, financed their own sessions, and licensed Trapped by a Thing Called Love to Westbound  ...