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Born in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest Virginia in 1909, Maybelle Carter grew up in a musical family. Playing music at home and in her rural community were common childhood activities for her. She had a natural talent and was able to learn several instruments, including two for which she would become very well known: autoharp and guitar.

In 1926, she married Ezra Carter, brother of A.P. Carter, who had married Maybelle's cousin Sara in 1915. A.P. had an entrepreneurial spirit and had begun traveling throughout the mountains to collect songs. Often his companion on these trips was an African American guitarist named Lesley Riddle. In an interview with Mike Seeger from 1965, Riddle said, "If I could hear you sing, I could sing it too. I was his tape recorder. He'd take me with him and he'd get someone to sing the whole song. Then I'd get it and learn it to Sara and Maybelle."

In 1927, A.P. became intrigued by an advertisement he saw for an upcoming Victor Talking Machine Company recording session that was to take place in Bristol, Tenn. He encouraged Maybelle and Sara to take the trip to Bristol with him so they could audition and possibly record songs as the Carter Family. They attended the session and recorded six songs over two days, August 1 and 2, 1927, capturing the sound of their three-person group: Sara's voice and autoharp, A.P.'s arrangements and vocals and Maybelle's guitar. These records were nationally distributed and gave listeners an opportunity to hear the musical sounds of rural, Southern Appalachia. Audiences responded well: The recordings were very popular and created a demand for more country music to be recorded. These sessions, known as the Bristol Sessions, produced not only the Carter Family but also superstar Jimmie Rodgers. Those several days in 1927 would become known as the Big Bang of Country Music.

As the popularity of the Carter Family grew so did the awareness of Maybelle's guitar playing style which received several nicknames with the most popular being the "Carter Scratch." Before Maybelle introduced her style of playing, guitar was often a background rhythm instrument. Her innovative technique involved playing a bass line while simultaneously playing chords, creating the sound of multiple guitars from just one instrument. The Carter Family's unique sound, with Maybelle providing both rhythm and melody, changed the way guitar would be used in bands from that point forward.

From 1927 to 1941 the original Carter Family recorded 292 songs. They traveled from their homes in Virginia to recording studios in Camden, NJ; Atlanta, Ga.; Memphis, Tenn.; Charlotte, NC; Louisville, Ky.; New York, NY; Chicago, Ill. and performed old-time ballads, traditional folk music, country songs and gospel hymns.

By the mid-1930s the Carter Family's record sales had slowed down. In 1938, when the opportunity to perform five days a week on the radio was presented, they took it. The money was good, and the exposure was huge — XERA was an over 500,000 watt radio station. Known as a "border-blaster," the station was located in northern Mexico just over the Rio Grande River. The station's broadcast was reported to reach up the Mississippi River into Canada, and as far east as Florida and New York City. With radio's growing popularity, the wide reach of this station offered the Carter Family a level of exposure they had never experienced before. In 1939, the Carter Family returned to XERA for a second season of on-air performances. Maybelle brought all three of her daughters to perform with her on the air. This would be their last season performing on XERA, as it was shut down by the Mexican government in early 1941. A few years later, in March 1943, the last of their other radio performance contracts expired and the original Carter Family stopped playing together.

Maybelle was already on her way to evolving the group from the original Carter Family into the Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters. This group was comprised of Maybelle and her three daughters, Helen (born in 1927), June (born in 1929) and Anita (born in 1933). Maybelle had a dedication to touring and performing that was often discouraged for women at the time. Helen Carter told Archie Campbell in a 1983 interview: "I can remember when mother started out with us Aunt Sara would say, 'May, When are you ever going to settle down and stay home like you should?' And that was not for mother, she enjoyed every minute." Maybelle continued to perform with her daughters on radio programs and television shows. They toured and performed together for many years, often on radio and television shows. Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters made studio recordings and became regulars on the Grand Ole Opry. Anita Carter sang a duet of "I Can't Help It If I'm Still in Love with You" with Hank Williams in 1952 on the Kate Smith Evening Hour television show. They opened for Elvis Presley in 1956 and 1957, and in 1961 they joined the Johnny Cash Roadshow.

Maybelle Carter was a pioneer of guitar playing and style. She was the first woman inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, along with her bandmate and cousin, Sara Carter. Their plaque states that the Carter Family are "regarded by many as the epitome of country greatness and originators of a much copied style."

Song Notes:

1. The Carter Family, "Wildwood Flower"
May 10, 1928, Camden, NJ
Sara Carter, vocal; Maybelle Carter, guitar.

"Wildwood Flower" is the most famous example of Maybelle Carter's innovative guitar playing technique known as the Carter Scratch. In this recording, you can hear her playing of the rhythmic bass line while simultaneously strumming the melody. In an interview in 1973, Maybelle comically recalled, "I never even dreamed of 'Wildwood Flower' hanging on like it has but it's really been a biscuit for us."

2. Maybelle Carter, "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow"
July 28, 1963, Newport, RI

"Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow" was the first song that the Carter Family recorded in Bristol, Tenn. in 1927. In 1963, the New Lost City Ramblers: Mike Seeger, John Cohen and Tracy Schwarz, brought Maybelle to the Newport Folk Festival. Here she is, 36 years later, performing the song solo and sharing a brief remembrance of that day in Bristol — giving us insight to her perspective at the beginning of her recording career.

3. The Carter Family, "Single Girl, Married Girl"
August 2, 1927, Bristol, Tenn.
Sara Carter, vocal and autoharp; Maybelle Carter, guitar.

This song was recorded by Sara and Maybelle without A.P. and features Sara's singing. Record producer Ralph Peer said, "As soon as I heard Sara's voice, that was it. I knew that it was going to be wonderful." The lyrics of this song lament the life of married women and the limitations and burdens that come with it compared to the freedom of being single. It must have resonated with people because it became the most commercially successful of all the records made by the Carter Family at the Bristol sessions.

4. The Carter Family, "Jimmie Brown the Newsboy"
November 25, 1929, Atlanta, Ga.
Sara Carter, vocal and autoharp; Maybelle Carter, guitar.

This song was originally written by William S. Hays in 1875. A.P. Carter took Hays' lyrics and incorporated them into the song, which the Carter Family recorded in 1929. Hays' other songwriting credits include "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" which was recorded by Fiddlin' John Carson in Atlanta in 1923 and became country music's first hit record. The success of Carson's recording inspired scouts to search throughout the South for musicians performing regional styles like Country, Blues and Gospel. It was Ralph Peer, the scout for Okeh Records present at Carson's session, who would be the first to record the Carter Family four years later.

5. Lesley Riddle, "Motherless Children"
1960s, Rochester, New York

This is a gospel blues song that was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927. Similar to A.P. Carter's approach to songbook music, Johnson added his own lyrics to his rendition of this song.

Lesley Riddle was a musician who traveled with A.P. on song collecting trips where A.P. would try to find musicians, sheet music and old songbooks with material that he could use for creating new songs. He was gifted in his ability to recall the music and lyrics of the songs heard and found on these trips. Riddle would also share with A.P. the songs he knew.

"Motherless Children" is one of the songs Riddle taught to the Carter Family, and they recorded their version in 1929. This performance was recorded by Mike Seeger during one of several visits he made to Riddle's home in the 1960s. Seeger connected with Riddle after Maybelle told Seeger that she had learned a number of songs — as well as the country blues bottleneck style of guitar — from Riddle. Of Maybelle's playing, Riddle told Seeger, "You don't have to give Maybelle any lessons. You let her see you playing something, she'll get it — you better believe it."

6. Sara & Maybelle Carter, "I'm Leaving You"
April 24, 1963, Angel's Camp, Ca.
Sara Carter Bayes, lead vocal and second guitar, and Maybelle Carter, harmony vocal and lead guitar.

After being separated for several years, Sara and A.P. Carter were divorced in 1936. In 1939, while performing on the Border Radio station XERA, she dedicated the song "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes" to Coy Bayes who had moved to California with his family six years earlier. This was all it took to rekindle their affection for one another, and they were soon married. Eventually Sara grew tired of being so far from her husband and moved to California in 1943. This was the end of the Carter Family as the trio it had always been. This song was recorded by Mike Seeger at the home of Sara and her second husband, Coy Bayes.

In his writing about this recording, Seeger recalled, "This is one of the few songs that we had full takes, and you can hear their ad lib but totally musical togetherness. Maybelle plays this song with a flat pick, which she did occasionally." The Delmore Brothers recorded this track in 1933, and it was released the following year. It had not been recorded by Sara and Maybelle prior to this session.

7. Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs Featuring Mother Maybelle Carter & The Foggy Mountain Boys, "You Are My Flower"
February 10, 1961, Nashville, Tenn.
Lester Flatt, guitar and vocals; Earl Scruggs, guitar and vocals; Curly Seckler, mandolin; Buck Graves, dobro; Paul Warren, fiddle; Jake Tullock, bass; Maybelle Carter, autoharp and guitar; produced by Don Law

This recording is from Songs of the Famous Carter Family, the 1961 album based on a concept that Earl Scruggs presented to Lester Flatt. Most people know Scruggs best as an innovative and influential banjo picker, but he also played guitar extraordinarily well. He cited Maybelle and Merle Travis as his two favorite guitar players. In a 2004 interview, Earl Scruggs recalled, "I used her guitar on that recording and I played all over that son of a gun and I could never make it sound like Maybelle Carter. I could not dig up what I heard her do." In another interview with Scruggs referenced in the book Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? he says Maybelle played the guitar on this recording because he couldn't get it right and when he asked her to show him how to play it the producer rolled tape and captured her performance, later splicing it into the tape.

8. Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters, "Foggy Mountain Top"
From the 2005 reissue compilation Keep on the Sunny Side: June Carter Cash — Her Life in Music

Music and performance were so important to Maybelle Carter's life it was only natural that she would include her children — Helen, Anita and June — in what she valued so dearly. This song gives each daughter her moment to shine, with each taking a turn for a solo. Don Law, a Nashville staple for this era of recording, produced this (as well as the previous Flatt and Scruggs track). Listeners can hear the similarities in the production style, as each are representative of the more polished and contemporary sound coming from 1960s Nashville studios.

9. Mother Maybelle & The Carter Sisters, "Root, Hog or Die"
June Carter, vocal; Maybelle Carter, guitar; Chet Atkins, electric guitar; Helen Carter, accordion; Anita Carter, bass

"Root, Hog or Die" is a saying that dates back to the 1800s, at least. It refers to the spirit of survival and how essential it is to thrive and to survive regardless of one's conditions and circumstances. This song has been adapted to fit numerous situations and circumstances. This particular version is a comic take on a woman's experience with a man who was charming at the beginning of their relationship and then became selfish and uncaring. June's comedic spirit really comes across in this performance.

Chet Atkins joined Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters in 1949. In his autobiography, Me and My Guitars, he recalled, "June had a natural genius for comedy, she could make anything funny with her style and delivery. Working with her in that way is what finally helped me start overcoming the crippling shyness I'd always had. When I learned how it felt to make people laugh, and became confident doing it, that's when I started to blossom as a performer. The musical mix of my guitar playing, their repertoire of country songs and ballads, and June's comedic talent made for a very appealing show. We drew big crowds everywhere we appeared."

10. Doc Watson, "Victory Rag"
Released 1966

Doc Watson grew up listening to the Carter Family's records and taught himself how to play in the style of Mother Maybelle. He added his own flatpick style of playing strings on the up strum, and his style of flatpicking would go on to become as influential as Mother Maybelle's. Here's a song from his album Home Again! which was released in 1966. He pays homage to Maybelle by playing her arrangement of "Victory Rag" on the record.

11. Norman Blake, Nancy Blake and Tim O'Brien, "Black Jack David"
Norman Blake, vocal and acoustic guitar; Nancy Blake, vocal, acoustic guitar and cello; Tim O'Brien, vocal and bouzouki; Laura Cash, fiddle; John Carter Cash, autoharp

This recording is from the Carter Family tribute album, The Unbroken Circle, which was released on August 24, 2004, a year after the passing of June Carter Cash. The album was initiated by Johnny Cash and his son, John Carter Cash. Norman Blake performed with Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters in Chattanooga, Tenn. in the late 1950s. He was teaching guitar lessons in Chattanooga in the 1960s when one of his students brought in a Doc Watson LP. Watson's flatpicking style was a revelation and influence to Blake, but like Doc, Blake would continue to pay homage to one of his original guitar inspirations, Mother Maybelle, as heard in this recording with his wife Nancy Blake and Tim O'Brien.

12. Joan Baez, "Wildwood Flower"
1960

Joan Baez began her career singing traditional folk songs and ballads. She recorded "Wildwood Flower" for her self-titled debut in 1960. The album introduced songs like "Wildwood Flower," "House of the Rising Sun" and "Silver Dagger" to a new generation of listeners who found inspiration in traditional folk and country music. Joan Baez and her folk music contemporaries like Bob Dylan and The New Lost City Ramblers were at the forefront of the folk music revival, without which the music of The Carter Family may not have reached young listeners.

13. Clarence White, "Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow"
Recorded in 1962
From the album 33 Acoustic Guitar Instrumentals
First appeared on Rounder Guitar - A Collection Of Acoustic Guitar, released in 1987

Clarence White was a flatpicking legend and innovator. He furthered the recognition of the guitar as a lead instrument while also creating a bridge between the worlds of country music and rock and roll, playing for The Kentucky Colonels and the Byrds. He recognized Doc Watson as an influence on his playing style, and by doing so Clarence incorporated elements from Doc which Doc had learned from Maybelle.

14. Tommy Emmanuel, "Cowboy's Dream"
From his 2014 album, The Guitar Mastery of Tommy Emmanuel

Tommy Emmanuel is a Grammy-nominated guitarist from Australia whose idol and inspiration is Chet Atkins and his fingerpicking style of guitar playing. Atkins began performing and touring with Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters in 1949 and developed as an artist under Maybelle and the Carter Sister's influence. Both the playing styles of Chet Atkins and Maybelle Carter can be heard in Emmanuel's version of "Cowboy's Dream" heard here.

15. Carolina Chocolate Drops, "Hello Stranger"
Hubby Jenkins, vocal and guitar; Rhiannon Giddens, vocal and banjo.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops were a Grammy-winning string band based in Durham, N.C. They brought the music of the Carter Family era to a new generation of fans while introducing and educating listeners to the important role African-Americans played in the history of American music. This version of "Hello Stranger" features vocalists Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins interpreting the Carter Family sound as part of the soundtrack to the 2015 documentary The Winding Stream." Dom Flemons, a former member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, headlined this year's Lesley Riddle Festival in Burnsville, N.C.

16. Lucinda Williams, "Little Darling Pal of Mine"
September 1978, Jackson, Miss.
Lucinda Williams, 12-string guitar and vocal; John Grimaudo, 6-string guitar

Lucinda Williams recorded "Little Darling Pal of Mine" for her debut album, Ramblin', which came out on the Smithsonian Folkways label in 1979. The album covers a variety of early, traditional American music and was an expression of Williams' influences, including this version of a song the Carter Family recorded in 1928.

17. Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land"
April 1944, released by Folkways Records in 1951
Woody Guthrie, vocal and guitar

"This Land Is Your Land" is Woody Guthrie's best-known song. Its melody is based on the Carter Family's gospel tune "When the World's on Fire." Matt Jennings, a childhood friend of Guthrie's, recalled to Ed Cray how Woody was always trying to master "the Carter Family lick." When the two of them would listen to Carter Family records on a wind-up Victrola, Jennings said, "Woody wanted to do all the runs; he loved those bass runs." Those influential bass runs can be heard here in a song so beloved there have been campaigns for it to serve as the national anthem of the United States.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

"In the recent passing of Bessie Smith, 'Queen of the Blues,' a brilliant chapter in the history of the theatre came to a close." It's the first sentence of St. Clair Bourne's reflection on Smith's legacy, published in the New York Amsterdam News a few weeks after her 1937 death. And it's a strange way of introducing someone most often thought of as a musical star — but Bourne apparently saw nothing unusual in exploring Smith's formative influence on blues and swing while also describing her as "royalty among theatrical performers."

Nor was Bourne an outlier: Black women blues performers were regularly referred to as "actresses" in the black press — particularly before, but also after, the so-called "race records" industry made them household names. Though the fields of "music" and "theatre" now have their own critics, their own publications and their own academic departments, the two were not always held at such a distance. In spite of my own graduate training in theatre history, I was confused when, blearily propped in front of a microfilm reader, I first saw Smith and her mentor and friend, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, called actresses (and, at times, as dancers, producers, wardrobe mistresses, monologists and comediennes). These descriptions appeared in "The Stage," a gossipy, shade-throwing showbiz column published in the African American newspaper The Indianapolis Freeman in the early decades of the 20th century. The discovery piqued my curiosity (so much so that I built a book around it). Though actresses have historically been associated with sexual immorality and duplicity, taking the actress label seriously — as Bessie Smith did — draws out two important aspects of early blues performance. First, Bourne's emphasis on "the history of theatre" reminds us that, as scholars Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have persuasively demonstrated, blues emerged in the popular theatre of the rural South. Second, we see how an embrace of the category of actress allowed Smith and her peers to refashion possibilities for black women and girls on stage at a time when those possibilities were exceptionally constrained.

In the early decades of the 20th century, prior to widespread phonograph and record ownership, the only way most people heard music was "live" (not a term audiences of the time would have used, having nothing to compare it to). Not just sound or song, early theatrical blues performances incorporated choreography, comedy bits, skits and set pieces. They were performed in vaudeville houses on the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit of Southern and Midwestern cities as well as before racially mixed audiences on the open-air stages of tent and variety shows that toured the rural South, cheek-by-jowl with the animal acts, trapeze artists, tappers and wire walkers of The Rabbit's Foot Minstrels, Tolliver's Smart Set and other companies.

Black women and girls on stage in the early 20th century faced a host of sexist and racist expectations and attitudes. Though "The Stage" was friendly to the idea, many considered "actress" a morally disreputable profession, just one step to the side of "prostitute." What's more, the utter dominance of blackface minstrelsy had primed audiences to see certain character types on the stage — black girls could not escape the Topsy character, nor could black women escape the Mammy or the Wench. Black minstrel performers of the late 19^th century had reappropriated the mask of blackface and played, often parodically, with its performance conventions. But whether played as a racial stereotype or as a mockery of that stereotype, the character options for black girls and women remained quite limited.

But Bessie was to change all that. While exceptional, her story was not unusual: orphaned at age nine, she began touring at the age of 14 with Moses Stokes' Traveling Show, where she met Ma Rainey. In this sense, she was not unlike the many black Southern girls who joined touring companies as an alternative to domestic or agricultural labor. These girls and women were ceaseless innovators, experimenting with musical form, comic interludes, and choreography to create a new musical and theatrical genre.

***

There is no single origin of blues, and I am not here to claim otherwise. But since the blues and folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s we have too often been fed a vision of an itinerant bluesman (you can see him in your mind's eye: an agricultural laborer with a guitar on his back, wandering from town to town) as the first and only singer of the blues. There is no doubt that the musical innovations of the male laborers in East Texas and the Mississippi Delta in the 1890s were extraordinarily significant; and there are significant musicological differences between, for example, Son House and Smith. But an overinvestment in this romantic image has led women blues performers on the theatrical circuit to be deemed mere imitators of a man's artistic invention. Attending to the widespread importance of the tent show highlights the invention, originality and influence of Smith and her peers.

Consider the Mississippi Delta, a geographic location that makes a strong claim as the "home" of the blues. The Delta's enthusiasm for tent shows boggles the imagination: Multiple companies would occupy the same small town for days at a time, all their shows selling out. One could not live and labor in the Delta and remain untouched by this vibrant culture of traveling entertainment, music and dance chronicled by "The Stage." That impact would have been compounded, surely, for anyone working as a musician. Ethnomusicologists have described the influence of Smith's recordings on male Delta musicians, but it is also true that a young Smith regularly appeared "live" on the stages of these Delta towns more than a decade before she recorded a song, singing, dancing and schticking her way to stardom. While it would be challenging if not impossible to prove, it is difficult to imagine that Delta residents such as Muddy Waters (who would become a performer in the Silas Green from New Orleans tent show), Charley Patton or Robert Johnson would not have attended one of these shows or not have been present at the dances that often followed.

If being a black actress during this period was complicated, it was even more so when one performed before racially mixed audiences, as Bessie Smith frequently did. The Southern tent show did not discard minstrelsy — the variety format is a direct retention of the minstrel show. It should come as no surprise, then, that the black intelligentsia of the early 20th century, though supportive of "high" art, looked upon the emergent black entertainment industry, with its close proximity to minstrelsy, with some degree of trepidation. But Smith had no truck with critics. In her own stage career, she found ways to insist on the dignity and stardom of the black actress. Embracing the role of actress, she transformed the possibilities for black women on stage, steering them away from minstrelsy's debasements.

Smith was the kind of actress who was always a star on stage. She never "disappeared into the role" as some actresses do. Her celebrity, power, and value were on display, no matter what character she played. But Smith also used her blues actress persona to make her interior life — her "true" self — permanently unavailable. She was constantly visible, but never gave any interviews, for example. The fact that she was (at least publicly) always playing a role confounded fans and journalists who always wanted more of her, all of her. And it similarly frustrates scholars and fans today who want to know more about what she intended, how she felt, and why she did what she did. It feels like a contradiction: By always inhabiting the actress, Smith maintained an interior life that was untouchable by the outside world.

Playing the actress, then, allowed Smith to flirt her way through the first-person narration of her songs, to confound the certainty of the relationship between a song's "I" and Smith herself. And she wittily used the uncertainty produced by acting to challenge her audience on matters of gossip and hearsay. A litany of self- destructive and hypocritical possibilities, "'T'Aint Nobody's Bizness If I Do" reads on the page as morose, particularly in its final lines, when the narrator suggests that she may remain with an abusive lover who beats her. In performance, though, Smith is upbeat and defiant, the narrator explaining:

There ain't nothin' I can do or nothin' I can say
That folks don't criticize me
But I'm going to do just as I want to anyway
And don't care if they all despise me.

It is tempting to map Smith's own stormy relationships with her lovers onto the lyrics of this song. But Smith couches her lyrics in the conditional. Refusing to confirm what has been said by others, she speaks only in the conditional: "if I do." The proliferation of "ifs" in the song teases the audience, tantalizing them with rumor while simultaneously telling them to butt out: "'T'Ain't Nobody's Bizness." Just as in Ma Rainey's "Prove It On Me Blues," Smith uses the song to tease her audience about what they've heard about her, all the while refusing to set the record "straight."

***

Acting allowed Smith (and the blueswomen who emulated her) to fashion a model of black womanhood that was full of possibility and, above all, capable of profound transformation. Her legacy lives on in the black women stars who have followed in her footsteps. When we puzzle over, for example, Beyoncé's (or is it Sasha Fierce's?) complex dance of disclosure and privacy, of feminist empowerment and opulent spectacle, we should remember Smith, who, with a group of black girls who grew up in poverty in the Jim Crow South, invented the traditions of black superstardom.

Both on the tent show stage and in publicity photographs, Smith (like Rainey) flaunted the glamour of her stardom with extravagant costumes and jewels. Smith was known as "the Empress of the Blues," and, as Daphne Duval Harrison chronicled in her profoundly influential Black Pearls, she dressed like royalty. Her performance affirmed her birthright: a sense of worth and value that was inherited and entitled rather than earned.

The jewels, sumptuous fabrics and fashionable trends that Smith wore on stage were often at odds with the set designs for the tent show, which relied on scenic tropes from minstrelsy and plantation musicals: magnolia trees, broken fence lines, cotton fields. When Smith appeared dressed for a Harlem nightclub appearance, she looked distinctly out of place — which was, of course, part of the point. The incongruity of this fashionable and bejeweled woman in a cotton field made the familiar conventions of blackness on stage seem strange — and made new possibilities available for black girls and women who no longer wanted to play Topsy or Mammy.

Surprisingly, Smith did play a mammy figure in her act for a time. This performance is documented by a rarely-circulated 1924 photograph of the star clad in a kerchief and polka- dotted dress, surrounded by her niece Ruby Walker and several young men, a side band known as the Dancing Sheiks. What is going on here? There is so much we don't know about this act. Smith-as-Mammy does not seem to square with the defiant woman who sang "I've Been Mistreated and I Don't Like It," the woman who physically attacked a Klan member who attempted to disrupt her show. Perhaps the demands of white audiences were too formidable for her to reject. Perhaps she took on the role in an attempt to parody it.

One thing we do know is that Smith asserted herself as the star, even—perhaps especially—when playing the mammy figure. Ruby Walker reported to Chris Albertson, Smith's biographer, that Smith used her broom to comically sweep the chorus line of young girls off the stage at the end of the act, leaving her alone on the stage. Even playing the mammy character, nobody upstaged Bessie. And then, just as quickly as she appeared, the mammy was gone, replaced by a regal and glittering queen, thanks to Smith's lightning-fast costume change. Reminding her audience that she could put on and take off roles as she chose, Smith sidestepped an old type, making room for the new.

Paige McGinley is Associate Professor in the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The first time I ever saw Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings perform was circa 2002 at the Elbo Room, a tiny venue in San Francisco's Mission District. If you've ever been there, you know the Elbo Room doesn't need many bodies to pack the floor, and with the Dap-Kings crowding the diminutive stage, the full intensity of their act filled the space from practically the first note. I was already familiar with the group through its early records, but hadn't fully appreciated how much power Jones could pack into her stout, 5-foot frame as she sang, sweated, stamped, strutted, slayed.

Jones, who passed away last week after a long, public battle with pancreatic cancer, enjoyed one of the great second acts of American pop music history, one whose countless retellings never seems to diminish its wonder. She was born in Augusta, Ga., in the mid-1950s, which made her just a little too young to have made a go at a soul career in the heyday of the 1960s and early '70s. The closest she got was at age 17, singing backup on tour with Long Island R&B girl group The Magic Touch. Fast forward 20 years and Jones was working as a corrections officer out of Rikers Island prison while moonlighting as a wedding singer on the weekends.

Back then, Jones was dating a saxophonist associated with New York's Desco Records, a short-lived but influential label specializing in vintage-sounding gutbucket funk singles. Desco's co-founder and engineer, Gabriel Roth, tinkered with perfecting that throwback affectation, but they still needed a singer who could nail the proper vocal vibe. Enter Sharon Jones.

In hindsight, it's easy to romanticize this chance encounter between Roth and Jones as fate, but the eventual magic they'd create took a while to fully develop. Somewhere in my crates, I have a few of those early Desco sides, many of which were pitch-perfect, retro-funk fare, but as much as I enjoyed those records, at times, they could sound more like attempts at stylistic replication than forging a distinctively original signature. I have an email from that era where I described Jones and her band as "another James Brown satellite."

But then Desco folded and Daptone Records arose from the ashes, with Jones and the Dap-Kings forming the new label's centerpiece. The group's first album, 2002's Dap-Dippin' With..., was recorded in between the two labels and carried much of the Desco style with it, but their next effort, 2004's Naturally, suggested a new direction, especially for Jones. On songs like the album's lush, closing ballad, "All Over Again, she emoted with a different kind of urgency, one based around a quiet intensity of feeling rather than just lung-busting power.

The thing is, as much as Jones was compared to the likes of such funk-era stars as Lyn Collins or Marva Whitney, her voice took on new texture and dimension when she played with earlier, blues-influenced styles, a la Lavern Baker or Ruby Johnson. She gradually mastered how to exert a hefty presence through small, inflective touches; I especially loved when she would end a line with a doo-wop curl into a higher register.

By the second and third times I saw Jones and the Dap-Kings perform, it was clear that their work was paying figurative and literal dividends: They sold out Los Angeles's El Rey Theater in December 2007, and by next summer they were headlining the Hollywood Bowl to a crowd that was roughly 50 times the size of the Elbo Room's. Touring behind what was arguably the group's best album, 100 Days, 100 Nights, Jones was in the spotlight like never before, though she had a little help from an up-and-coming pop-soul singer out of London's Southgate neighborhood: Amy Winehouse.

When producer Mark Ronson began working with Winehouse on what would become her renowned sophomore album, 2006's Back to Black, he enlisted the Dap-Kings as both session players and a tour band. As Back to Black began to blow up with its own notably retro-soul groove, comparisons between Winehouse and Jones were inevitable, especially as the former's burgeoning stardom seemed to follow an all-too-familiar pattern of white singers finding greater success with styles initially associated with black innovators. As Jones herself told me in a 2007 interview, "we've been out here for the last 11 years and we went to London and there was a craze about it. We started this thing. A lot of them have heard us over the years and now they want it." Without taking away from Winehouse's own unique style, it's undeniable that Back to Black's sound borrowed heavily from the Dap-Kings', but in return, as Winehouse's prominence grew, it compelled many to discover and champion Jones and the band.

It's remarkable to realize how much Jones and the Dap-Kings helped influence the broad pop landscape, coming out of that moment. Established acts like Solange Knowles and Raphael Saadiq began dabbling in various retro-soul offerings, but more substantially, an entire cadre of independent label soul artists arose alongside the Dap-Kings. That included other, older soul survivors such as Lee Fields, Charles Bradley and Nicole Willis, but also younger artists including Lady, Mayer Hawthorne, Myron & E, and Nick Waterhouse. Jones and the Dap-Kings weren't the sole reason behind this explosion, but they were undeniably one of the most productive engines powering it.

In 2013, as the band was supposed to be recording their fifth original full length (Give The People What They Want), Jones was diagnosed with what eventually was identified as pancreatic cancer. She immediately went into treatment and that experience and its impact on her career and the band is documented in Miss Sharon Jones, a documentary released earlier this summer. Some of the most powerful scenes show Jones rocking a post-chemo bald head and storming the stage with an unexpected ferocity despite her weakened condition.

Miss Sharon Jones ended production when her cancer had gone into remission, but when the film first premiered a year ago, she disclosed that it had returned, more aggressive than ever. She returned to treatment, but still attempted to maintain an active touring schedule. The last time I spoke to her was for an interview in July of this year, and when I asked how she mustered the energy to still perform, she said "right before I get on that stage, it's like something comes over me and the pain goes away. I guess the adrenaline just gets going and your body's just like, 'Well, here we go!'"

Hearing about Jones's death on Friday felt like yet another cruel blow in a year already brimming with unimaginable musical loss. But I immediately thought back to all her past performances, especially that first time, commanding the Elbo Room. Her vitality was enthralling, and much as I mourned her passing, I spent far more time dwelling on how remarkable her life was. Starting at age 40, she began to realize the dream of every kid who ever saw a mic and thought "One day..." She went on to forge a 20-year career of incomparable performances and influential recordings that'd be the envy of any artist out there. And in those final, difficult years, her dedication to her band and fans, her ineffable presence on stage, reminded me that there is still a beauty and grace in this world that even the specter of death cannot diminish.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

Sophie Kemp | NPR Music

In a new video for Hannah Gill & The Hours' "Austin," the 18-year-old singer walks around the city's streets followed by a brass band. She's fuming; she'd thought one thing about the way love was supposed to turn out for her, but instead she's wound up with betrayal and heartbreak. "Austin" isn't just the name of the city, but also the name of a lover who's wronged her. She takes to the streets and broods alone in a bar shouting his name: "Austin / You were my first lover / Why'd you say you love me if I meant nothing to you." The video pays impeccable homage to the '50s, from the outfits Gill wears to the décor inside the bar in which part of it is set.

Gill is a belter, and when she sings, she sings. In "Austin," her voice is booming and scathing. Along with co-songwriter and guitarist Brad Hammonds, Gill gives the song the kind of vibe that lets you imagine it playing out in the background of an action movie. But in an email to NPR Music, Gill writes that the song was, surprisingly enough, originally inspired by a wedding: "Austin was written the day of a wedding we played where the groom was named Austin. Brad [Hammonds] and I wanted to tie in the city Austin with the groom's name and went for it. We wrote it in like 20 minutes and then played their wedding that night."

Hannah Gill & The Hours' "Austin" comes from the band's self-released debut EP, The Water.

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Signed to a label when she was just 16, Jarosz shifted gears in 2009 to enter the New England Conservatory of Music. Her latest album, Undercurrent, is the first since her graduation, and features cameos and collaborators that include Crooked Still's Aoife O'Donovan and Nickel Creek's Sara Watkins.

Set List

• "Early Morning Light"

• "House Of Mercy"

• "Everything To Hide"

• "Take Another Turn"

• "Jacqueline"

• "Comin' Undone"

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

Gregory Alan Isakov's three studio albums have been spare and intimate: His voice, his guitar, sometimes a banjo, a piano, a fiddle, some drums. With his latest LP, Isakov wanted to build his songs bigger — so he gave them to a symphony. The Colorado Symphony, to be exact.

"It was kind of one of those daydreamy ideas that you write down, and you're kind of like, 'This is way too far out. This will never happen.' But then it happened! And we thought, let's record 15 songs and see which ones lend themselves the best," Isakov explains. "You know, there's the normal kind of nervousness that you get when you play for other people outside of your kitchen. But I think, when you're playing this music in these buildings that are created for music, it's indescribable."

Isakov spoke with NPR's Rachel Martin about the creation of Gregory Alan Isakov with the Colorado Symphony. Hear more of their conversation at the audio link.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll emcee some shows at the Sac Music Fest,” I told the boss. “Who’s playing?”

Hmmm. I was never a big fan of funk, but I love blues, and there is a thread there I thought I might enjoy. So I went to their show.

Oh. My. God. Frobeck is my new favorite band.

This is not your mother’s funk. This, as I said onstage when I introduced the band Saturday at the festival, is Funk with a capital F. And even though nothing quite matches the experience of hearing this band perform live, I am also enjoying every beat of their CDs.

Let's start with Spencer Burroughs (keyboard, vocals) and Kris Dilbeck (guitar, vocals), you can tell these guys have been playing together since they were young. And it's obvious they've been trained by some of the best (Berklee College of Music). They just have that connection. You know, when you can feel what the other one is doing without ever looking at him.

Frobeck frontman Spencer Burroughs and singer Callie Dilbeck harmonizing on the Turntable on the Green stage at Sacramento Music Fest 2016.

Saturday's late afternoon heat didn't deter folks from coming out to enjoy Frobeck.

All the comparisons to Sons of Champlin and Tower of Power are accurate, but Frobeck also gives us original compositions and a unique sound.

I find it impossible to hear their music without moving my feet. Sacramento audiences should adopt this band and make sure they play here again. Often. Soon.

I was part of a small group dancing backstage at the Sac Music Fest, when one of the guys from Pablo Cruise walked up and said, “I love these guys. They’re so tight.”

Well, there you go. Check out Frobeck on Facebook.

And speaking of Pablo Cruise...

Frobeck's funky, high-energy set paved the way for festival headliner Pablo Cruise.

So much about the band SHEL comes down to family. The group's name is an acronym for the four members — Sarah, Hannah, Eva and Liza Holbrook — who happen to be sisters. They grew up in Fort Collins, Colo. and were home-schooled by their mother, but it was their dad who really pushed his daughters to learn music and singing together.

SHEL released its second album, Just Crazy Enough, earlier this month. Eva and Sarah Holbrook joined NPR's Rachel Martin to talk about how their upbringing shapes their music, and why recording an Americana cover of a Metallica song felt like the most natural thing in the world. Hear their conversation at the audio link.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

From the buzz that surrounded Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the breakout album Sturgill Simpson released two years ago, you might not know that Simpson is a deep thinker who treasures his blue-collar, Appalachian roots. When it came out, some folks pegged him as a cross between a hell-raising outlaw and an acid tripper with his head in the clouds. A drug reference in one of the songs got, shall we say, a disproportionate amount of attention.

"That's my fault," he says. "I made the mistake of thinking that ... you could put LSD in a song without people thinking that that's weird. I fail to see how anything can still be weird in 2016. You know what I mean? But, whatever."

On his latest album, A Sailor's Guide to Earth, Simpson deliberately steers his music — well, down to earth. He's all about being a dad right now, though you you wouldn't know it from his car: an old Ford Bronco like the one his coal-mining maternal granddad used to drive. But the big tires, roaring engine and missing backseat are hardly ideal for transporting Simpson's toddler around Nashville.

"We talked about bolting a child seat into the floor board, but my wife was like, no," he says. "She shot that down pretty quick. When I go home to eastern Kentucky it comes in handy, but mostly it just pisses off the neighbors."

Simpson's office is a musty basement lair he shares with legendary songwriter John Prine. There's a vintage pinball machine in one corner, a jukebox in another and a kitchen table between.

"I needed a writing space to get out of my house with the little guy," he says. "Because any time I try to write or sit down and do things, he wants to be there with me and play the guitar."

Simpson's son was born right before Metamodern Sounds came out. But the singer was on the road so much that he had to watch the baby grow in photographs. So in his new songs, Simpson wanted to create a musical letter to his wife and kid, much like the letter his paternal grandfather wrote to his own family when he shipped off to serve in World War II.

"I learned more in those three pages about that man than I probably ever could have, like, sitting in a room and talking to him," he says. "I wanted to do something really special for my kid. That might be completely self-indulgent, to write your first major-label debut as a dedication to your family. But, you know, that's where my heart was."

Simpson decided to produce the album on his own. Right across the hall from his writing room is the studio where he recorded with seasoned engineer Dave Ferguson — Ferg, to those who know him. He remembers when Simpson first started talking about this record; he said he didn't really have much.

"He told me he didn't have no songs. He says, 'Man, I ain't really got anything. I got a few notes,'" Ferguson says. "'I was like, 'Oh Jesus. Everybody's here.' I went outside — and he told my second engineer Sean Sullivan, 'I'm really just messing with Ferg. I got all these songs. I got 'em in the bag right here.'"

Every song came from Simpson's pen but one: Remembering how Nirvana's "In Bloom" spoke to him in junior high, he decided to reimagine it.

"I just really want to make — to be cliché about it — I want to make pretty music," he says. "Like Roy Orbison or Elvis, man. Those guys made beautiful, tender music."

To achieve that in his own music, Simpson expanded his hard-edged country sound with streetwise soul horns and lush string arrangements. And to help him figure out which tracks were keepers, he played them for his son. The kid dug the music. Some day, he may also appreciate the conflicted emotions in the lyrics.

"I also wanted him to know that it's very important to me that he doesn't have to grow up and be this numb, callous person to feel like he's a man," he says. "I wanted him to know it's okay to be empathetic and compassionate and sensitive and whoever he grows up to be. God forbid in the event that something did happen to me before he grows up, then he has, at least, some semblance left behind to get an understanding of who his father was, instead of what he might read on the archives of the grand ole internet."

And besides, the reality of who Sturgill Simpson is is so much more interesting.

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