Born in 1935 to professional musicians who struggled through the Great Depression, Kaye learned early that music was a sparkle in a life otherwise defined by poverty. When her father sold her mother’s piano to fund a 1942 move to California, the family found themselves in a housing project in Wilmington. Kaye was a child of the laboring class, scrubbing floors and cleaning apartments to help her mother put food on the table. It was a ten-dollar steel guitar that eventually offered an exit ramp f...

It was in the visceral heat of an R&B club in 1950s St. Louis: the scent of pomade, the hum of amplifiers, and a teenager named Anna Mae Bullock watching a man named Ike Turner with a trance-like intensity. Born in the rural community of Nutbush, Tennessee, to sharecroppers who eventually abandoned her, Anna Mae had spent her childhood picking cotton and singing for change on street corners. When she finally grabbed the microphone from a drummer during an intermission in 1956, her voice—a mix of...