E9589 - Denise LaSalle: The Blues Queen Who Owned Her Own Hit Records in 1971

In 1971 one of the biggest hits on the national R&B chart was produced, owned and controlled by a Black woman who had picked cotton in rural Mississippi a few decades earlier. This episode follows Denise LaSalle from her birth in July 1934 in LeFlore County, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers, through gospel choirs in Belzoni and a move to Chicago at 13 in the middle of the Great Migration. Working as a barmaid at Mix Lounge, she met Chess Records scout Billy The Kid Emerson, signed a one-year contract, and was shelved without recording a single session, a...