In 1937 Count Basie offered Helen Humes $35 a week to fill the spot vacated by Billie Holiday, and she declined because she already made $35 a week in Cincinnati. Born in 1913 in Louisville, Kentucky, to one of the city’s first Black attorneys and a schoolteacher, she recorded blues for OKeh at 14, then walked away for a decade to finish school, study finance and work at a bank, as a waitress and as a secretary in her father’s law office.

This episode traces her eventual four years with the Basie Orchestra, including the 1939 From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, the brutal realities of Jim Crow touring that damaged her health, her 1944 move to Los Angeles and the jump blues hits that bridged swing and R&B, and her 1967 retirement to care for her mother, when she sold her records and record player and took a job at an ammunition plant. Critic Stanley Dance coaxed her back for the 1973 Newport Jazz Festival, launching a revival that lasted until her final album in 1980.

• A middle-class Louisville upbringing that shielded her from predatory 1920s contracts
• Cooking on hot plates and sewing buttons for the band on segregated tour routes
• A G3 to C5 range and the back-phrasing technique compared to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday
• Million Dollar Secret, the 1945 R&B hit and a copyright dispute with Tina Dixon
• The Cookery, the Nice Jazz Festival and a French award before her death in 1981 at 68