Consider the electric tension of Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1952: the hum of an expectant crowd and a woman standing nearly six feet tall, possessing a voice so thunderous it supposedly didn't even need a microphone. This was the moment Willie Mae Thornton became Big Mama, a nickname bestowed by the theater’s manager after she blew the roof off the building. Born in 1926 in the small town of Ariton, Alabama, Thornton was the daughter of a Baptist minister and a choir-singing mother. Her musical ...

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...