Linda Martell was primed to become a major country music star in the early 1970s.
She had a hit single on a successful album that had Billboard praising her “terrific style and … true feeling for a country lyric.” She was booking shows with stars such as Waylon Jennings. And she became the first Black woman to play the stage at the Grand Ole Opry.
But Martell never released another album. In her telling, she was sidelined in favor of White artists and, after the industry’s power brokers blacklisted her, she gave up on her career and left Nashville in 1974.
Martell’s name faded into obscurity. Now 50 years later, Beyoncé is reminding country music fans of Martell’s contribution to the genre.
In her new album “Cowboy Carter,” the pop superstar gives several shout-outs to Martell, including a track named after her. It’s part of an apparent effort to showcase Black musicians’ past and present roles in shaping country music while also highlighting how their contributions to the industry went ignored for decades.
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Quia Thompson, Martell’s granddaughter, tweeted after Beyoncé’s album was released at midnight: “I really wanna wake my grandma up and give her a ton of kisses!”
Martell started performing with her family in South Carolina when she was a child, according to her website. After being discovered as a solo act on Charleston Air Force Base, she moved to Nashville in 1969 and found almost immediate success.
Her single “Color Him Father” hit No. 22 on the Billboard country music charts, the highest a Black woman would get for more than a half-century until Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em” rose to No. 1 late last month, according to Martell’s website. Her album “Color Me Country,” which was released in 1970, led Billboard to hail her as a “female Charley Pride,” who became country’s first Black superstar in the 1960s. She booked an appearance on “Hee Haw,” the country music variety show and her watershed Grand Ole Opry appearance.
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Martell was successful but was in a genre dominated by White producers, musicians and fans, said Alice Randall, a professor of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University and author of the upcoming book “My Black Country.” Audiences shouted racial slurs and other hateful words during nearly every live show, Martell’s website states. What turned out to be her last single “Bad Case of the Blues” underperformed, and a spat with her label, Plantation Records, led the owners to blackball her, an accusation that’s disputed.
“And then she just disappears,” Randall said.
Martell’s collapse didn’t make sense, Randall added. She was an attractive singer with a sweet voice and impressive vocal range who chose her songs well.
“She has all the pieces,” Randall said. “She’s very much kind of the Black girl next door.”
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Martell spent the next couple of decades bouncing around the country trying to find a second act but never matched her initial success in Nashville, according to Rolling Stone. Now 82, she lives in South Carolina with her family.
Although Martell struggled to reclaim her stardom, she influenced other Black women trying to break into country music, Randall said. That included Rissi Palmer, who in 2007 became the first Black woman to climb the Billboard country music charts as an individual artist since Martell, and Rhiannon Giddens, a banjo player featured on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em.”
“Linda Martell is a beacon of light to all these women,” Randall said.
But she was almost unknown to everyone else, and so was her music, Randall said, adding that when she started researching Martell in 2009, she struggled to find a copy of her album. Around then, someone uploaded it in its entirety to YouTube, exposing new generations to it for the first time.
The increase in exposure continued for more than a decade. In a 2013 Lifetime movie “A Country Christmas Story,” which starred Dolly Parton, a character explains Martell’s importance to the protagonist, a biracial teenager who wants to be a country singer. At the 2021 Country Music Television Awards, Martell was given the Equal Play Award, her career providing “an eternally compelling case for why the music industry must always support marginalized artists.” In honoring her, the CMT noted that “the groundbreaking African American female country vocalist [was finally getting] ‘Sent her flowers’ after a bittersweetly important career.”
Then, on Friday, Beyoncé upped the ante, exposing millions to Martell in one fell swoop, which came a little more than a month after she became the first Black woman to reach No. 1 on the Billboard country music charts.
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Randall said that’s fitting, because Beyoncé is using “Country Carter” to simultaneously honor the past while re-creating the genre, and that’s what country has always been about — a balance of preservation and evolution. That paradox applies to Martell’s story as well by reimagining it from one in which a young Black woman washes out of Nashville’s country music scene to one in which she achieves unprecedented success.
“Before Martell, it had never been done,” Randall said. “She fought never and won.”
That transformation will continue. Her granddaughter, Thompson, is making a documentary about Martell’s country music career titled “Bad Case of the Country Blues,” a nod to the title of her grandmother’s last single.
On Friday, Martell seemed content to once again be near the center of country music, a half-century after she begrudgingly left Nashville. In an Instagram post, she said that she’s tickled to be having a renaissance courtesy of Queen Bey.
“I am proud that @beyonce is exploring her country music roots. What she is doing is beautiful, and I’m honored to be a part of it,” she said. “It’s Beyoncé, after all!”
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