Alberta Hunter spent twenty years as a hospital nurse before a mandatory retirement at what her paperwork said was age 70 pushed her out the door. She was actually 82, and soon she was performing at a Greenwich Village nightclub and signing with Columbia Records. This episode traces how a girl who fled Memphis for Chicago alone at age 11 went from peeling potatoes in a boarding house to singing with King Oliver’s band at the Dreamland Cafe, improvising verses on the spot to hold the crowd at the Panama Club.

Along the way we examine the business betrayal behind Down Hearted Blues, which Hunter co-wrote with Lovie Austin and which earned her just $368 after Bessie Smith’s version sold nearly a million copies, and the pseudonyms she used to record for competing labels. We follow her to London, where she appeared opposite Paul Robeson in Showboat and sang at the Dorchester Hotel, through her USO service leading a unit into the China-Burma-India theater, and into the private life she guarded fiercely, including her long relationship with Lottie Tyler.

• How the AAB structure of twelve-bar blues let her invent lyrics in real time for a rowdy Chicago audience in 1914
• The predatory deal by J. Mayo Williams that routed the royalties from Down Hearted Blues away from her
• Why she walked away from performing after her mother’s death in 1957 and forged documents to enter nursing school at 62
• The 1976 party for Mabel Mercer where Charles Bourgeois heard her sing, leading to a two-week trial at The Cookery that became a six-year residency
• Her brief marriage to Willard Saxby Townsend, her identity as a queer woman, and her inductions into the Blues Hall of Fame and Memphis Music Hall of Fame