COUNTRY’S LOST PIONEER
LINDA MARTELL WAS THE FIRST BLACK FEMALE SOLO ARTIST TO PLAY THE GRAND OLE OPRY, BUT HER PROMISING CAREER WAS PLAGUED BY RACISM AND ENDED ALMOST AS QUICKLY AS IT BEGAN. FIFTY YEARS AFTER HER ONLY ALBUM, SHE’S LOOKING BACK. BY DAVID BROWNE
Long after the music faded out, she can still hear the hateful words. The year was 1969, and Linda Martell hoped to become one of country music’s breakthrough acts. She had a single on the charts, an album on the way, and the backing of a Nashville industry player. The next step was to play live, and her newly hired booking agent secured a gig in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, to work out her stage show.
Martell had a warm smile, a stylish beehive, and a way with country phrasing, as heard on that hit, “Color Him Father,” a story-song about a hardworking stepdad who cares for a woman and her seven children after her husband is killed in combat. But Martell was a black woman, singing in a genre dominated by white acts. And that night, she heard a reaction she’d rarely gotten during her years singing R&B. “I remember that well,” she says. “You’d be singing and they’d shout out names and you know the names they would call you.”
It’s more than 50 years later, and Martell, now 79, is sitting in the dining room of her daughter’s home in Irmo, South Carolina. Her long, gray-streaked hair falls to her shoulders, and she sports a Sunday-best white-and-black dress. “You’re gonna run into hecklers, and I did,” she continues, via Zoom. “Name- calling. That was something else.” She shakes her head. “You felt pretty awful.”
Recently, country music has shown some measure of progress in adding black voices: Kane Brown, Mickey Guyton, Jimmie Allen. But black artists were even more of a rarity in country in the Sixties, and Martell helped smash that barrier: She was the first black female solo country artist to play the Grand Ole Opry, she landed three singles on the country charts, and she appeared on Hee Haw, the hugely popular country variety show.
“WHEN YOU’RE PLAYING TO AN ALL-WHITE AUDIENCE
— BECAUSE LORD JESUS, THEY ARE PREJUDICED —YOU LEARN TO NOT SAY TOO MUCH.”
Her lone album, 1970’s Color Me Country — a spunky and heart-melting honky-tonk set — stands with just about any country album released at the time. “Country music’s come a long way, so I give kudos to her,” says Brown. “Color was a thing back then. It’s still a thing today, but it was worse back then.”
But while pioneering black country acts like DeFord Bailey and early crossover sensation Charley Pride are in the Country Music Hall of Fame, Martell has been relegated to obscurity. Looking for inspiration when she started her career, Guyton typed “black women country singers” into a search engine, and up popped Martell. “I didn’t even know she existed,” Guyton says. “What she went through, being heckled and called the n-word. It’s so similar, even though they were in such different times.”
For the past three decades, Martell has lived in virtual anonymity in South Carolina. But with her family’s urging, she feels the time has come to revisit her victory and her struggles. “That was a time and a half,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong. There were some beautiful people. And some not that beautiful.”
Thelma Bynem arrived into a segregated world. Born in 1941, one of five children, she grew up in Leesville, South Carolina, which had separate churches for white and black people. Her father, Clarence, was a sharecropper, and her mother, Willie Mae, toiled away in a chicken slaughterhouse. Thelma began cooking dinners for her family when she was seven; it was the only way she could avoid working in the fields. She and her family sang gospel in their Baptist church but also heard country tunes on Nashville’s WLAC radio. Her father’s favorite song, which he would often burst into around the house, was Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”
As a teenager in the late Fifties, Thelma formed a trio, the Anglos, with one of her sisters and their cousin. Thelma came across like a Southern version of Ronnie Spector, with a deep throb embedded in a big voice. A local DJ, Charles “Big Saul” Greene, played a pivotal role in her transformation. “He said, ‘Thelma ain’t good for a stage name,’ ” she recalls, “and he scribbled on a piece of paper and said, ‘Your name is Linda Martell. You look like Linda. That fits you.’ ”
Initially billed as Linda Martell and the Anglos (later the Angelos), the group released its first single, 1962’s “A Little Tear (Was Falling From My Eyes),” on the Fire label. The trio released a couple of other singles, but the songs did nothing for their career or bank accounts. They broke up, and Martell carried on singing R&B in Carolina clubs. When she was 19, she had married drummer Clark Thompson, and the couple had three children. Around 1966, she attended an Otis Redding concert in South Carolina; as Martell and family members recall, he sang one song directly to her and then kissed her on the lips. Martell says Redding then asked her to go on the road with him in some capacity, but her husband prohibited it: “He knew what would occur,” says their daughter Tikethia. Martell and Thompson separated in 1966.
Nobody, not even Martell, would have guessed what came next. William “Duke” Rayner, who ran the K Furniture store in Nashville, saw Martell singing at an Air Force base in South Carolina; at the crowd’s urging, she did a couple of country covers. Hungry to enter the music business, Rayner offered to pay for a demo tape. Martell initially blew off his calls, but she finally took him up on his offer. Rayner introduced her to Shelby Singleton Jr., a stocky, wavy-haired man who’d produced records for both black and white artists. “Rhythm & blues and country music are the most parallel types of music,” he once said. “It’s the working people who make up the listeners for both.”
In 1969, Martell met with Singleton in the office of his company, and Singleton seemed to realize that her ambitions had not been fulfilled. “He asked, ‘What do you want to do? Do you want to go on like you were?’ ” she recalls. “I said, ‘I want to sing.’ ” To her surprise, he asked her if she could sing country. “I looked at him, like, ‘Really?’ ” she says. “I was a little bit shocked! But he said, ‘You gotta go country.’ ”
It was a risky move. Black contributions were among country’s building blocks, but black singers had made few inroads into the genre. Bailey played the Opry, Ray Charles recorded country songs, and Pride, the son of a Mississippi cotton picker, scored a series of hits starting in the Sixties. But Singleton and Rayner, now her manager, saw commercial possibilities. “I figured that if I could find a colored girl that could sing country & western,” Rayner said in 1970, “I’d really have something.” Singleton died in 2009, but his brother John, who worked with him at the company, says he liked to cut against the grain. “He didn’t care if the rest of the music business wasn’t doing it,” John says. “He thought that would be something really unique, if he could be the first one to have hits with a black female country artist.”
Even by Nashville’s efficient standards, things moved fast. On May 15th, 1969, Martell signed a management contract with Rayner; the next day, she put her signature on a one-year record deal with Singleton. Almost immediately, Singleton gathered Martell and session musicians together in one of his studios. There, he played everyone the original version of “Color Him Father,” by a D.C. soul group called the Winstons, then told Martell to sing it.
Martell took one pass at it, but Singleton wasn’t happy: “He said, ‘Put your voice on there. I don’t want to hear the Winstons. I want to hear you.’ ” So she approached the song as a little bit country, a little bit R&B, and just as important, she connected to the tale it was telling. “I did a lot of country songs, and I loved every one of them,” she says. “Because they just tell a story.”
One by one, Singleton would pull out a song, and Martell and the musicians would learn and record it on the spot. Inspired by memories of her father singing country, she pulled out a yodel in the honky-tonk shuffle “Bad Case of the Blues,” and her own marital challenges informed her reading of “The Wedding Cake.” The arrangements were lean and spunky, making her sound like the equal of Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette. “Those country musicians were something else,” she says with a laugh. “They would listen to me sing a line or two from a song and then put their instruments on it. That was amazing.”
In one, long 12-hour workday, the album was finished, and the single “Color Him Father” was on the market three days after Singleton signed her. “And from then on,” she says, “I was Linda Martell and doing country music.” martell’s country makeover began with promise. She moved to Nashville with her second husband, TVrepair-shop owner Ted Jacobs, and their combined four children from previous marriages. Singleton hooked her up with a company specializing in booking country acts, and she was advertised in the South as the “First Female Negro Country Artist.” After that disturbing show in Missouri, she appeared at an Austin country festival with acts including Waylon Jennings, who called her, as Martell recalls, “a little bit country, but a lot rock & roll.” “Color Him Father” ultimately reached Number 22 on the country chart.
In 1969, Martell made her debut at the Opry, where, as she recalls, she reveled in two standing ovations; by her account, she appeared there a total of 12 times. At various times at the Opry she was photographed with country icons like Roy Acuff and Lester Flatt. Color Me Country came out in August 1970, and her upbeat, eager-to-please persona prompted at least one TV executive to consider her for a job hosting a country talk-variety show.
But the heckling and slurs Martell heard during her early country debuts were far from the most jarring surprises. One of those arrived early, when Singleton informed her that her music would be released not by his SSS International record company but on its sister label devoted to country — which sported the actual name of Plantation Records.
From its launch in 1968, Plantation was home to both white and black artists. Martell says Singleton
told her there wasn’t a specific reason he chose that name, with its connotations of slavery. “I said, ‘Yes, there was,’ ” Martell recalls. “He said, ‘Of course not.’ I said, ‘Yes. What you are telling me is that black people belonged on the plantation!’ ” Singleton himself never made such a public declaration about the label’s name, and rarely, if ever, explained its origins; John Singleton says he doesn’t recall why his brother chose the name for his label. But lacking any other options, and fully aware of Singleton’s industry clout, Martell had little choice but to go along with his plan. “I didn’t like it,” she says, “but that’s the name he wanted.”
It was only the first of many eye-opening experiences. She was booked for a show in Beaumont, Texas, but the promoter canceled it when she arrived and he saw she was black. Fans would tell her she didn’t sound black, which took her aback. Invited to perform on the all-important Hee Haw, a show executive approached her during rehearsals and instructed her on the correct way to pronounce her words. At a Hee Haw party, as Martell recalls, Pride gave her advice on how to survive in country: Develop a thick skin and get used to the name-calling.
But adjusting to the taunts was not so easy. Singleton advised her to refrain from addressing the audience in any way. “He was right,” Martell admits. “A lot of times, you feel like saying, ‘Please quit calling me names like that.’ But you can’t say that. You can’t say anything. All you can do is do your singing and try your best to forget about it. When you’re playing to an all-white audience — because Lord Jesus, they are prejudiced — you learn to not say too much.” Sensing how rattled she could get onstage, people would sometimes hand her drinks to get through a performance. “Sometimes,” she says, “it was a way to get through things.”
After a while, the taunting lessened but never entirely went away. “You still heard some names,” she says. “You wonder why people do it. Why not just sit there and enjoy the music?”
As quickly as Martell’s country rebirth arrived, it was over. Her difficulties started in May 1970, when Rayner sued Martell for failure to pay commissions. He said she had made $6,500 that year and had the potential to make $40,000 more, and he deserved his cut. According to Martell, Singleton made the case go away, one way or another.
But for Martell, a bigger issue was the attention paid to her labelmate, Jeannie C. Riley. In 1968, Plantation scored its biggest hit ever with Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” Riley, who was white, became an overnight sensation. “When Jeannie came on the scene, it seemed like he forgot all about me,” she says. “I told him I’m not gonna play second fiddle to Jeannie C. Riley. That’s when we separated.”
According to John Singleton, Martell’s break with his brother’s company had more to do with issues with Martell’s husband, Ted (who died in 2007). Martell decided to leave Plantation, and her contract specified that she could sign with another label once her contract was fulfilled. But no sooner had she cut a few new tracks for another, now-forgotten label, she says, than Shelby Singleton threatened to sue the other company. “He blackballed me,” she says, a flash of anger taking over her face. “You heard the term? No one else would record me. It ruined my reputation in country music.” ( John Singleton says he has no memory of this.)
For the next 20 years or so, Martell led a nomadic life in search of a career reboot. She returned to South Carolina, but she and Jacobs split up, and his business partner became her new boyfriend. The couple bounced from Nashville to, briefly, Los Angeles, where she sang on a cruise ship. She and her new beau then moved to the Bronx, where they opened a record store that focused on R&B and disco records. In the Eighties, Martell wound up in Florida, fronting an R&B cover band led by her brother Lee, a keyboardist. Finally, in the early Nineties, Martell returned home to South Carolina, in part to be closer to her children. Her father died in 1991, and to earn a living, she took a job driving a bus for the school district of the newly combined town of BatesburgLeesville; eventually, she also worked in a classroom with children who have learning disabilities. To some she was a local hero. At a high school assembly, Martell was called to the stage for a special shout-out: “We have black history right here in our own school,” the school principal told the crowd.
But others barely knew of her or that she worked in the area. When Batesburg-Leesville town manager Ted Luckadoo asked around to see if anyone remembered her, he learned that they did — but as the kindly older lady who worked for the school system. “I said, ‘Did you know Linda Martell worked for our school district driving a bus for many years?’ ” Luckadoo says. “‘ What?’ People don’t put two and two together sometimes.”
Her past two decades have been especially difficult. In 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a difficult radiation treatment, eventually retiring from her job. When she sang, it was with a local R&B cover band, Eazzy; one of the last times she sang publicly was in 2011, at a black-tie Christmas party in town. She lived in a mobile home until, prompted by health concerns, Tikethia brought her mother to live with her and her family.
Every so often Martell is recognized. A 2013 Lifetime movie, A Country Christmas Story, told the fictional story of a biracial teenager who wants to sing country. In one scene, an older character fills her in about Martell. “It didn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful Linda was,” says Guyton. “Just the fact that she was there was groundbreaking.”
As much as her one album, that courage may be her legacy. Does she at least take pride in paving the way for all the black country artists who have followed in her wake? Her church-lady smile fades a little. “Sometimes,” she replies, but says nothing more.