On the back cover of Bob Dylan’s 1970 album New Morning, a young Dylan stands beside an older, distinguished Black woman most listeners never identify. She is Victoria Spivey, the Queen of the Blues, and without her a large piece of American roots music might not have survived. Born Victoria Regina Spivey in Houston in 1906 to a musical family, she was playing piano at adult rent parties by age seven after her father’s death, accompanying silent films at Dallas’s Lincoln Theater by 1918, and holding her own as a teenager in rowdy after-hours buffet flats alongside Blind Lemon Jefferson. That hard-won stage presence carried her to St. Louis in 1926, an OKeh Records contract, and the hit Black Snake Blues.

This episode follows Spivey through six decades of reinvention: recording with Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Lonnie Johnson while writing her own material about addiction, prison and bad relationships; pivoting to Hollywood in King Vidor’s 1929 film Hallelujah and the Broadway hit Hellzapoppin when the Depression gutted record sales; and retreating to the church organ in 1951 as rhythm and blues took over. When the 1960s folk revival arrived, she returned on her own terms, founding Spivey Records in 1961 with husband Len Kunstadt to record overlooked veterans like Lucille Hegamin and Roosevelt Sykes, and in 1962 bringing a practically unknown Bob Dylan into a Big Joe Williams session. Through her Record Research column Blues Is My Business, she fought to correct a history that kept crediting women’s innovations to men. She died in New York in 1976 and entered the Blues Hall of Fame in 1986.

• How playing rent parties and buffet flats as a child taught Spivey to command a room without a microphone
• The leverage of record sales and vocal delivery that let her keep creative control at OKeh in the 1920s
• Why her 1951 retreat to the church was a strategic move rather than burnout
• Spivey Records as an early independent-label model for preserving elders and mentoring new talent
• Her public challenge to the accepted history of Black Snake Blues and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Black Snake Moan