In January 1955, NBC affiliates across the South threatened to cut the feed of a live broadcast of Tosca because the romantic lead was a Black woman. This episode follows Leontyne Price from Laurel, Mississippi, where her parents traded the family phonograph for a piano and hired teacher Hattie McInnis when she was three and a half, to a childhood trip to hear Marian Anderson, a piano-accompanist role at Wilberforce University, and the sophomore solo that changed everything.

The hosts dismantle the paternalistic rescue narrative around the Chisholm family and reconstruct the grassroots funding, including a 1948 Paul Robeson benefit concert, that sent Price to Juilliard. They explain what a lyric spinto soprano can physically do, recount the 42-minute ovation at her 1961 Metropolitan Opera debut in Il trovatore, examine the creative conditions she set for Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra at the opening of the new Met in 1966, and follow her deliberate pivot to the recital stage, thirteen Grammy Awards, and the admiration of Miles Davis.

• What the Orff method meant for a toddler learning rhythm through movement and play
• How the Chisholm record collection became her doorway to European opera
• The Leontyne Price Fund, Alpha Phi Alpha prize money, and churches passing the hat
• Why she demanded a regal Cleopatra and refused a trauma narrative for a wealthy white audience
• Presidential Medal of Freedom, Kennedy Center Honors, and a Tosca recording Miles Davis said he wore out