Etta Baker

Biography

Etta Baker (March 31, 1913 – September 23, 2006) was an American Piedmont blues guitarist and singer from North Carolina.

Early life and career

She was born Etta Lucille Reid in Caldwell County, North Carolina, of African-American, Native American, and European-American heritage. Baker began playing guitar at the age of three. She was taught by her father, Boone Reid, a longtime player of the Piedmont blues on several instruments. He was her only musical instructor. She played both the 6-string and the 12-string acoustic guitar and the five-string banjo. Baker played the Piedmont blues for nearly ninety years.
The family moved to Keysville, Virginia, in 1916. There were eight Reid children, four girls and four boys. All but one survived into adulthood. Each of her siblings played instruments. Occasionally, Baker, her father, and her sister, Cora, would play together at dances on Saturday night. Boone Reid worked a series of jobs during the 1910s and 1920s, occasionally taking work in factories and shipyards in other states. The rest of the family lived with an uncle. By the time Etta Reid was 14 years old, the entire family worked on a tobacco farm in southern Virginia, which meant that they were together. She dropped out of school after tenth grade.
Baker was first recorded in the summer of 1956, after she and her father happened across the folksinger Paul Clayton while visiting the Cone mansion, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, near their home in Morganton. Baker's father asked Clayton to listen to his daughter playing her signature "One Dime Blues×One Dime Blues1991 · ReleaseSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 20 tracks1Never Let Your Deal Go Down3:062One-Dime Blues2:363Knoxville Rag2:014Broken Hearted Blues4:565Lost John2:526Dew Drop2:217Going Down the Road Feeling Bad2:238Near the Cross I Watch and Pray2:069Spanish Fandango2:1910Round My Back Door Selling Coal2:5511But on the Other Hand Baby3:0312Crow Jane2:0113John Henry5:1614Alabama Wagonwheel1:5315Bully of the Town2:5916Going to the Racetrack1:4517Police Dog Blues2:3318Marching Jaybird2:2919Railroad Bill2:2920Carolina Breakdown2:49". Clayton was impressed and arrived at the Baker house with his tape recorder the next day, recording several songs. Clayton recorded five solo guitar pieces by Baker, which were released as part of the 1956 album Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, one of the first commercially released recordings of African American banjo music. Baker was not monetarily compensated for these early recordings. Only after working with the Music Maker label later in life was she able to get rights back for this music.
Baker said that she got inspiration for chords through her dreams, stating that it is "like putting a crossword puzzle together". Baker influenced many well-known musical artists, including Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.
Etta married Lee Baker, a piano player, in 1936 after courting for six years. They had nine children, one of whom was killed in the Vietnam War in 1967, the same year her husband died. For a while after these deaths, she stopped playing, but found she missed the consolation the blues brought her. She last lived in Morganton, North Carolina, and died at the age of 93 in Fairfax, Virginia, while visiting a daughter who had suffered a stroke.

Awards and honors

Baker received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1989, a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991, and the North Carolina Award in 2003. She was nominated for several Blues Music Awards (formerly the W. C. Handy Blues Awards): in the Traditional Blues Female Artist category in 1987 and 1989, and her album Railroad Bill×Railroad Bill4 February 2016 · Studio albumSpotify (search)YouTube Music (search)Tracklist · 19 tracks1Carolina Breakdown3:122Railroad Bill2:423I Get the Blues When It Rains3:044Careless Love3:265Don't Let Your Deal Go Down2:376Sunny Tennessee1:477Mint Julep3:098Browns Boogie2:339Lonesome Road Blues2:1410Goodbye Booze1:5911Nobody's Business1:5312One-Dime Blues1:4213Going Down the Road Feeling Bad2:3814Candyman2:2215Miss a Little Miss2:1116Baby Let Me Lay It on You2:5217Chilly Winds2:2218John Henry3:1719Cripple Creek1:56 in the Acoustic Album category in 2000. Along with her sister, Cora Phillips, she received the Brown-Hudson Folklore Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1982.