In 1940s Detroit, a 16-year-old girl slipped out into the freezing night clutching a forged birth certificate so she could enter amateur singing contests in jazz clubs. Born Lillie Mae Jones in Flint in 1929, Betty Carter grew up in an emotionally distant home where her father was a church musical director, and she later described her childhood as a lonesome trek with no cheering section. This episode traces how Detroit’s jazz scene, including encounters with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, became the surrogate family that validated her drive.

The story follows her explosive stint with Lionel Hampton, who fired her seven times in two and a half years over her refusal to abandon bebop improvisation for crowd-pleasing swing, the nickname Betty Bebop she rejected, a decade of grueling dues in the 1950s, and the Ray Charles duets that put Baby It’s Cold Outside atop the R&B charts in 1961. It then explains why, as a single mother in an ageist industry that considered jazz dead, she launched her own label, Bet-Car Records, in 1969, took jazz into academia at Goddard College in 1972, and eventually saw Verve come to her in 1987 to reissue her catalog on her terms.

• How she treated the voice like a horn and elevated scat singing from gimmick to invention
• Why swing and bebop clashed so violently on Lionel Hampton’s bandstand
• What running an independent label in 1969 required, from pressing plants to distribution
• Her 1988 Grammy, White House performance, and the Jazz Ahead program at the Kennedy Center
• Why she considered the 1997 National Medal of Arts her single most important achievement