When Rose Maddox walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage in the 1940s in a custom Nathan Turk Western costume with a bare midriff, the crowd gasped. She did not care. This deep dive traces her from a sharecropping family in Boaz, Alabama, who left for California in 1933 with $35 for seven people, to a pioneer who permanently altered country, rockabilly and bluegrass music.

We follow the Maddox family hopping freight trains, sleeping in a jail cell and in the concrete culverts of Pipe City, and landing on the front page of the Oakland Tribune before settling in Modesto. Then we trace the Maddox Brothers and Rose from KTRB radio to Four Star Records, Hollywood and the Louisiana Hayride, her solo run of 14 Billboard country hits, and her late-life Grammy nomination for $35 and a Dream.

• How a childhood in locked boxcars erased any fear  ...