In 1971, at a televised memorial concert for Louis Armstrong, his ex-wife collapsed at the piano with a fatal heart attack, a dramatic bookend that overshadowed the life she lived. This episode digs into Lil Hardin Armstrong as an independent composer, bandleader and strategist. Born in Memphis in 1898 to a family shaped by her grandmother Priscilla Martin, a former slave who fled Mississippi in a mule-drawn wagon, she received rigid classical training, earned a diploma from Fisk University, and moved to Chicago in 1918. There she worked as a sheet music demonstrator for about $3 a week before bandleader Lawrence Duhé offered $22.50 to play in his cabaret band, a job she hid from her mother by claiming it was a dancing school. Her first night with New Orleans musicians taught her that no one knew the key; they simply told her to start playing aft ...