The Nobody Years

Every legend spent years as a nobody.

The documented early history of artists whose names everyone knows — from a wooden shack in Barnwell, South Carolina in 1933 to a supermarket job in Vega Baja in 2016. James Brown dancing for coins in Augusta. Johnny Cash selling appliances door to door in Memphis. Loretta Lynn singing in Washington bar rooms. Nine decades of the same story, told the same way.