At seven, Jessye Norman blanked on the second stanza of a hymn at a local competition and placed third. She later joked it was the last memory slip she ever suffered in public. This episode follows the girl from Augusta, Georgia, born in 1945 into a musical family, who sang gospel at four, discovered the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on a birthday radio at nine, and heard Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price prove that the art form had room for someone who looked like her.

We trace her elite training at Howard, Peabody, and the University of Michigan, her strategic move to Europe, her 1968 ARD competition win, and her Deutsche Oper Berlin debut in Tannhäuser, followed by Aida at La Scala and Covent Garden. Her 1983 Metropolitan Opera debut as Cassandra in Les Troyens drew a 15-minute ovation, and the conversation explains how she safely defie ...