A world-famous contralto returns to perform in New Jersey and has to sleep in Albert Einstein’s spare bedroom because the local hotels will not give her a room. This episode traces Marian Anderson’s path from a working-class Philadelphia family, a father who died when she was twelve, and a church community that pooled nickels and dimes for her vocal training, to a Philadelphia music academy that rejected her on the spot because of her race and a private coach moved to tears by her audition.

The hosts follow her strategic pivot to Europe, where the Scandinavian press coined the term Marian Fever, a Finnish composer rearranged music for her range, and a Salzburg conductor called hers a voice heard once in a century. They then examine the 1939 refusal by a patriotic women’s organization and the D.C. school board, the First Lady’s resignation, the Easter Sunday concert for 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial, the critique that politicians blamed a private club while enforcing segregation themselves, her 1955 Metropolitan Opera debut, and the quiet Connecticut farm life she guarded fiercely.

• What a true contralto voice is and why European audiences were mesmerized by it
• Seventy recitals a year under Jim Crow with no dining cars, station restrooms, or hotels available
• Why the Lincoln Memorial concert reached millions more people than any concert hall could
• A wedding secretly moved to a cemetery chapel to escape a church bake sale
• Presidential inaugurations, a United Nations delegation, the 1963 March on Washington, and a fund for young marginalized musicians