In 1959 producer John Hammond took out a missing persons ad in Variety to find one of the architects of 1920s American music. Ida Cox, billed as the Uncrowned Queen of the Blues, was living quietly in Knoxville, Tennessee, 14 years after a stroke ended her career mid-performance. This episode traces her from the shadow of Georgia’s Riverside plantation, where she was born Ida Prather, through running away at 14 to join White and Clark’s Black and Tan Minstrels, the brutal TOBA vaudeville circuit with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, and a 1922 Memphis radio broadcast on WMC that made her a major name.

Beyond the stage, we examine her aggressive entrepreneurship: recording 78 sides for Paramount alongside Lovie Austin and Tommy Ladnier while secretly cutting records for rival labels as Kate Lewis, Velma Bradley, Julia Powers and Jane Smith; self-financing the Raisin’ Cain tent show with husband Jesse Tiny Crump and taking it to the Apollo Theater in 1929; and downsizing to the Darktown Scandals to survive the Depression. We close with Carnegie Hall in 1939, the Buffalo nightclub stroke in 1945, her 1961 comeback album Blues for Rampart Street with Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, her death from cancer in 1967, and the statue unveiled in Knoxville in April 2026.

• Why minstrel-show caricature and blackface were the non-negotiable entry fee for Black performers of her era
• The flat-fee economics of race records and how pseudonyms let Cox multiply her income across labels
• Songs she wrote herself about lost government jobs, domestic boundaries and female economic independence
• The Sepia Mae West persona with tiara, cape and rhinestone wand, and the tap dancer in her troupe who became drummer Earl Palmer
• Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concert, sessions with Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, and how the folk revival’s Nancy Harrow and Barbara Dane kept her songs alive