Sexual freedom and educational possibilities and new jobs are all in the air, but the atmosphere of the album stays close to the themes of father and mother and home-of fidelity and the countryside, even as it touches, tentatively, the new, modern freedoms.Ĭolor Me Country opens with two cuts about rural-to-urban migration. And if a wedding cake seems to be the prerequisite for sex in one song, in another it's clear that we have moved into an era in which good women can have enough lovers to almost confuse their names. People travel from the countryside to the city by bus-but they do travel. In her South, they know about dishwashers and televisions, but they don't have them. The South and the '60s Martell portrays in Color Me Country is altogether other from mine. The only thing close to country music anybody listened to was The Country Gentlemen. 1969, where even black ten-year-old girls like me were fed a steady diet of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin along with tacos and crepes, and anti-war protests. Forty years after Martell's historic but forgotten performances on the Opry stage, I spent part of a rainy October Music City day tethered by headphones to a turntable, listening to her one album over and over, thinking about Martell and the year it was released, 1969. Or maybe she didn't think about it at all that first August night or the nights that came quickly after. Or maybe it amused her that folks in the Confederate Gallery had paid to hear her sing.
I suspect Linda Martell, born Thelma Bynem in Lexington County, South Carolina, on June 4, 1941, shrugged them off. When I stood on the stage of the Opry in 1984, those words shocked me. Eleven times, she stood on the stage and stared out at the words painted across the Ryman balcony in large letters: confederate gallery. But we forgot.Įleven times, Linda Martell stood on the stage of the Ryman Auditorium and sang to the folks. Hers was not a voice, or a face, to forget. She stretched out the o-o-o till it sounded like something between a country moan and a blues wail. Martell's scrubbed-clean (of blackness and the South and poverty) but sensual voice made San Francisco seven syllables. And she did it all with a squeaky-sultry voice reminiscent of Patsy Cline-but she was more like a girl Glen Campbell. I know she could bend notes, she could yodel, and she could phrase to create a subtle counterpoint rhythm with the music. And the way she could bend notes, well, it made an eight-note scale fourteen, or I don't know how many.
Her notes were sweet across a whole lot of piano keys. Her daddy was a preacher, and she had a God-given voice.
COLOR ME SHOCKED ALBUM SKIN
She was pretty in a soft-as-Lynn-Anderson way-except her shining, long hair was brown, her shining eyes were brown, and her glowing skin was brown. In the picture on her 1969 Plantation Records album cover, Color Me Country, Linda Martell looked perfect in an orange minidress. In 1969, Linda Martell was a chocolate-brown beauty from South Carolina who had a hit song, "Color Him Father," on the country radio. Bojangles," and "The Ballad of Curtis Loew." I knew I wanted to be the first black woman Harvard graduate to write a country song-and I thought I knew DeFord Bailey, the groundbreaking harmonica player, was the first and only black person to perform as part of the Opry. I knew somecountry songs that celebrated black folks: "Reuben James," "Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine," "Mr. I knew Jimmie Rodgers had been influenced by black trainmen, and I knew Hank Williams had been influenced by a black street musician named Tee-Tot. I knew the banjo was an African instrument. I had been in Nashville about a year and a half. I slipped out of the dressing room and up to the stage.
Looking at circa-1984 Orbison and a chicken in a cage wearing a Cash costume got me crazy claustrophobic. It was my job to get the stunt chicken into a little, tiny, black Johnny Cash outfit. A stunt chicken was in the dressing room, too. When a television producer I knew called to ask if I wanted a couple of days work on a Johnny Cash video shooting inside the shut-down Ryman, I didn't ask many questions.Ī few days later, I was in a basement dressing room with Roy Orbison. The "Mother Church" was locked up and passed over by country-come-lately Urban Cowboy fans flocking to the slick and ginormous-that was a new word then-Opry House installed in a corner of a theme park. Folks on Music Row kept asking me if I was related to Johnny Rodriguez, and I kept telling them I was an ordinary American black person. The first time I stood on the Ryman Auditorium's Opry stage, the place was defunct, and I was breaking rules.
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