Her parents’ separation and the instability that followed was not unusual for the time and place. The economic pressure of sharecropping — of working land you didn’t own, under conditions you didn’t set, for a return that the landowner determined — produced family stress that expressed itself in departures and separations and children raised by grandmothers and aunts. Anna Mae Bullock’s childhood was shaped by this instability, and the self-reliance and resilience that subsequent events would require of her was partly formed in the experience of navigating a childhood in which the adult structure around her was not reliable.
She sang in church. The church music tradition of the Mississippi Delta is one of the foundational streams of American popular music: it is the direct ancestor of gospel, the indirect ancestor of soul and R&B, the sonic environment in which the children of that community learned what music was for and what it could do. A voice trained in church in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s was being trained in a tradition of extraordinary depth and ambition — a tradition that understood music as the vehicle for communal emotion at its most intense, that required the singer to connect with an audience not through technical polish but through genuine expressiveness.
The secular equivalents of that tradition — the blues, the R&B that came from it — were played on the radio and in the clubs that the Chitlin’ Circuit served. The children of the Delta grew up hearing both, and the best of them carried both into their adult work.