Beyoncé won two Grammys last night – which, judging by her reaction to the first of them, was twice as many as she’d expected. She froze – actually seemed to physically buffer – when Cowboy Carter was announced as Best Country Album, walking up to the stage in an apparent fugue state and sputtering out an uncharacteristically breathless series of thank-yous and oh-my-Gods before rushing off again.
When the second one came around – this time for Best Album – we saw an altogether more rehearsed performance. She may have had a feeling this one was on the cards, and she’d taken time to think about what to say.
She thanked LA’s firefighters, two of whom presented her with the award. She made gentle reference to just how long this one had been coming – it took five Best Album nominations for the most decorated artist in Grammy history to finally win one. She thanked the Grammys, and everyone who helped her make the album. And she dedicated the win to “Miss Martell.” Then off she went.
The Miss Martell in question was Linda Martell, who, 55 years ago, became the first Black woman to see commercial success as a country singer, before disappearing into obscurity for decades, only to return to the public realm by invitation of one Beyoncé Knowles Carter as a featuring artist on Cowboy Carter.
Martell was born in 1941 in rural South Carolina, to a father who worked as a sharecropper and a mother who worked in a chicken slaughterhouse. She grew up listening to country music, but first performed as part of an R&B trio with her sister and cousin. When her cousin left the group to get married and her sister soon followed suit, Martell continued to perform as a solo act, singing mostly R&B and pop with the odd country number thrown in.
Then a Nashville furniture salesman called William Rayner heard her singing a country number on a South Carolina air base and offered to record her a demo. Understandably sceptical, Martell initially declined, before changing her mind and eventually making Rayner, who flew her to Nashville to meet and perform for producer and record label owner Shelby Singleton, her manager.
So began the career of a country music icon. Except that, not long after recording her first (and still only) studio album, 1970’s Color Me Country, Martell disappeared from the industry.
Race played a prominent role in her departure. Martell signed to Singleton's label, “Plantation Records” – whose name refers to what you’re currently hoping it doesn’t, and understandably made Martell uncomfortable, especially given that the label was named and operated by a white man in Singleton.
Martell’s desire to perform was corroded by regular experiences of racism – white audiences would routinely taunt and shout racial slurs at her. When Singleton informed her in 1974 that he was going to be putting a little less effort than he had been into promoting her career so that he could focus on trying to make her labelmate Jeannie C. Riley the next big thing, Martell quit the industry.
She continued performing, but it was in small clubs or on cruise ships, or at weddings or family reunions. After running a record shop for a while, she moved back to South Carolina and became a bus driver. Many of the people in her life didn’t even know she was once a successful singer with a record deal and Shelby Singleton on the phone urging her to “go country.”
Then, last year, her name appeared on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. Queen Bey had enlisted the help of several country music legends to catalyse her transition from the worlds of pop and R&B to country – Willie Nelson was on there a couple of times, and Dolly Parton made an appearance. Alongside them, featuring on “SPAGHETTII” and reading an introduction to “YA YA” that featured as a song in its own right (and one named after her no less), was Linda Martell.
It’s a great shame that Martell’s career was cut as short as it was. Listen back to Color Me Country and you’ll hear a beautifully controlled voice eliding serenely over gentle guitar and drums on “Color Him Father”, alongside the likes of the cheerily self-conscious shrug of “Bad Case of the Blues”, which features more classically country elements of slide guitar and even some able yodelling from Martell.
“Color Him Father” actually set a record upon its release in 1969, for the highest-charting country single by a Black female artist. It held that record for 55 years, until it was broken last year by Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em”. And there's a whole ecosystem of Black female country artists out there – check out Miko Marks, Rhiannon Giddens and Valerie June if you're interested – bringing vital and long-overdue diversity to a traditionally white, traditionally male genre. If they get the exposure they deserve, and that Beyoncé's success in the genre may give them, one suspects it may not be quite as long until the record's broken again.
