This is that story.
## Anna Mae Bullock: Nutbush, Tennessee
Anna Mae Bullock was born on November 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee, and grew up in the small community of Nutbush, about fifty miles east of Memphis. Her father, Floyd Bullock, and her mother, Zelma Currie, were a sharecropping family in the Mississippi Delta cotton country.
Her childhood was not stable. Her parents separated, and the family structure broke up around her: she was sent to live with relatives, her mother moved to St. Louis, and her grandmother raised her for a significant portion of her childhood. When her grandmother died, she moved between relatives before eventually joining her sister Alline in St. Louis in 1956.
The Mississippi Delta produced an extraordinary concentration of blues and R&B musicians across the middle decades of the twentieth century, and the music that surrounded Bullock’s childhood was the music of that tradition: church music, gospel, the rhythm and blues that played on the radio and in the clubs of the river towns. She sang in church. She listened carefully. She absorbed it, which meant that when the opportunity to sing in front of a real band eventually presented itself, she had more years of careful listening behind her than her age might have suggested.
She graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis in 1958 and was working as a nurse’s aide when the musical opportunity arrived — not through a plan or an audition, but through proximity and personality and a voice that was immediately distinctive.