On the back cover of Bob Dylan's 1970 album New Morning, a young Dylan stands beside an older, distinguished Black woman most listeners never identify. She is Victoria Spivey, the Queen of the Blues, and without her a large piece of American roots music might not have survived. Born Victoria Regina Spivey in Houston in 1906 to a musical family, she was playing piano at adult rent parties by age seven after her father's death, accompanying silent films at Dallas's Lincoln Theater by 1918, and holding her own as a teenager in rowdy after-hours buffet flats alongside Blind Lemon Jefferson. That hard-won stage presence carried her to St. Louis in 1926, an OKeh Records contract, and the hit Black Snake Blues.

This episode follows Spivey through six decades of reinvention: recording with Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Lonnie Johnson while writi ...