LaVern Baker was the second female solo artist ever inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, behind only Aretha Franklin, yet a few years later she was buried in an unmarked grave. This episode traces the Chicago-born singer who debuted as Little Miss Sharecropper in the post-war club scene, cycled through the names Bea Baker and Dolores Baker, and finally broke through at Atlantic Records with the million-selling “Tweedlee Dee” in 1955, followed by “Jim Dandy,” “I Cried a Tear,” and “Saved.”

We dig into Georgia Gibbs’ note-for-note cover of “Tweedlee Dee,” which went to number one on the pop chart, the 1950s copyright loophole that protected sheet music but not the sound of a recording, and how Baker sued for a quarter of a million dollars and then petitioned Congress, spurring Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs to investigate song theft. We follow her 1969 USO tour, the bronchial pneumonia she contracted after Vietnam, and the 22 years she spent running entertainment at the Marine Corps Staff NCO Club at Subic Bay in the Philippines, then her 1988 return at Madison Square Garden, her Broadway turn replacing Ruth Brown in “Black and Blue,” and her final years singing from a wheelchair after diabetes cost her both legs.

• Why Little Miss Sharecropper was a persona built to echo Little Miss Cornshucks, and why she outgrew it
• How compositional copyright let major labels legally clone rhythm and blues hits for white pop singers
• The vocal architecture that fused jazz phrasing, gospel power, and crisp diction into a rock and roll prototype
• Tours with Bill Haley and the Comets in Australia, stardom in Jamaica, Ed Sullivan, and the film “Rock, Rock, Rock”
• The 1991 Hall of Fame induction, her 1997 death in medical debt, and the headstone historians finally raised in Kew Gardens in 2008