What she did with that right, in the years that followed, was build a record that no one who encountered her in 1978 could have predicted. The second career is not a survival story. It is a career story, a story about work and taste and timing and collaboration and a voice that was, as the Los Angeles Times put it, melting vinyl.
She died on May 24, 2023, at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. She was eighty-three years old. The name on the marquee she had fought for in a Dallas divorce court was, at the moment of her death, one of the most recognized names in the history of popular music.
That is the answer to the title’s question. She kept the name. Then she built a career bigger than before.
## The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Economics of Black Touring
The Revue that Anna Mae Bullock joined in 1960 operated in a specific economic and cultural infrastructure that the mainstream American music industry rarely acknowledged but could not have functioned without: the Chitlin’ Circuit. This network of Black-owned venues — theaters, clubs, ballrooms — existed because most white-owned establishments in the South and in segregated sections of Northern cities were not available to Black performers. The Chitlin’ Circuit was not a lesser version of the mainstream entertainment economy; it was an economy of its own, with its own star system, its own standards of performance, its own economic logic.
For a touring R&B act in the early 1960s, the Chitlin’ Circuit was the road. You played the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, the Apollo in Harlem, the Regal in Chicago, the Howard in Washington, the Royal in Baltimore. You played smaller clubs and ballrooms in between. You played a lot, and you played for audiences who had strong opinions about what good performance looked like, because the Circuit had been creating standards for decades.