In January 1955, NBC affiliates across the South threatened to cut the feed of a live broadcast of Tosca because the romantic lead was a Black woman. This episode follows Leontyne Price from Laurel, Mississippi, where her parents traded the family phonograph for a piano and hired teacher Hattie McInnis when she was three and a half, to a childhood trip to hear Marian Anderson, a piano-accompanist role at Wilberforce University, and the sophomore solo that changed everything.

The hosts dismantle the paternalistic rescue narrative around the Chisholm family and reconstruct the grassroots funding, including a 1948 Paul Robeson benefit concert, that sent Price to Juilliard. They explain what a lyric spinto soprano can physically do, recount the 42-minute ovation at her 1961 Metropolitan Opera debut in Il trovatore, examine the creative conditio ...