Linda Martell

Linda Martell (born June 4, 1941, near Leesville, South Carolina, U.S.) is a pioneering American country music singer who was the first Black female artist to perform at the venerable Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. She had a top 25 hit (“Color Him Father”) on Billboard’s country chart in 1969 but then faded into obscurity until a resurgence of interest in her career brought her back into the spotlight in the 21st century. In 2024 Martell was featured as a guest artist on Beyoncé’s country album, Cowboy Carter.

Early life and career

Martell was born Thelma Bynem, the daughter of Clarence Bynem, a sharecropper and minister, and Willie Mae (née Caldwell) Bynem, who worked in a chicken slaughterhouse. One of five children, Bynem started cooking her family’s nightly dinners at age seven to avoid being sent out to work in the fields. From a young age she was interested in music and began singing in the choir at her family’s Baptist church along with her sister and three brothers. Her family listened to country music songs on the Nashville radio station WLAC, and her father enjoyed singing Hank Williams’s classic “Your Cheatin’ Heart” around the house.

When Bynem was 12 years old, she began singing with a pop band in Columbia, South Carolina. At 16 she teamed up with her sister, Evelyn, and a cousin to form a rhythm and blues (R&B) trio called the Anglos. The trio sang in clubs, but it was during a school gig that she was discovered by a local disc jockey. As Bynem told Rolling Stone in 2020, “He said, ‘Thelma ain’t good for a stage name,’ and he scribbled on a piece of paper and said, ‘Your name is Linda Martell. You look like Linda. That fits you.’” With her stage name chosen, Martell and her trio mates briefly became Linda Martell & the Anglos before changing the group’s name to the Angelos; her brother Elzie Lee Bynem also played with the group for a time. The group recorded its first single, “A Little Tear (Was Falling from My Eyes),” in 1962, but it was not a commercial success. A couple of other singles were released, and the Anglos sang backup for notable R&B acts such as the Drifters and Jimmy Hughes. The group broke up when Martell’s cousin got married.

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Fleeting stardom

Martell’s career got a boost when an aspiring music agent named William (“Duke”) Rayner saw her performing as a solo act at an air force base in Charleston, South Carolina, and persuaded her to come to Nashville. Rayner introduced her to record producer Shelby Singleton, Jr., who told Martell, “You gotta go country.” In May 1969 she signed a one-year record contract with Singleton and recorded the single “Color Him Father.” A moving and sweetly subversive song about a father’s love for his seven stepchildren (whose biological father had been killed in the Vietnam War), it was originally recorded earlier that year by the soul group the Winstons. Martell’s version puts a country spin on it with an R&B flavor. As she told Rolling Stone:

Country music tells a story. When you choose a song and you can feel it, that’s what made me feel great about what I was singing. I did a lot of country songs, and I loved every one of them. Because they just tell a story.

Martell’s version of “Color Me Father” was released in 1969 and went to number 22 on Billboard’s Hot Country chart. A week after its release, Martell became the first African American woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry. (In 1967 singer Charley Pride was the first Black solo singer to appear at the Opry.) Such was her success that she would perform 12 times at the venue. She also appeared on the country variety TV show Hee Haw. By this time Martell had moved to Nashville with her husband and their four children to focus on her burgeoning country music career.

In 1970 Martell released the album Color Me Country, which features “Color Him Father” and rose to number 40 on the country album chart. “Linda impresses as a female Charley Pride. She has a terrific style and a true feeling for a country lyric,” Billboard wrote in its review. The album, released by Singleton’s label Plantation Records, also features a cover of Duane Dee’s “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” and the honky-tonk track “Bad Case of the Blues.” Both songs made the country music chart, peaking at number 33 and number 58, respectively. Promoters in the South touted her as the “First Female Negro Country Artist.” She toured the country circuit, sharing the stage with other country artists such as Waylon Jennings and Hank Snow.

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Obscurity and rediscovery

Despite Martell’s success, fame brought her racist abuse, including racial slurs hurled at her during her shows. Country music remained a genre dominated by white artists and white producers. Indicative of this was the name of the record label under which Martell’s records were released, Plantation Records. Though the label hosted both Black and white artists, Martell confronted Singleton about the name’s connotations with slavery. “I didn’t like it,” she told Rolling Stone, “but that’s the name he wanted.”

Martell’s album Color Me Country turned out to be her only album. She stopped recording by 1974, having said that the music industry pushed her aside in favor of white singers and that she was blacklisted by the industry. She went on to do a variety of jobs, some of which involved music, including singing at clubs in her home state of South Carolina and in Florida, performing on a cruise ship, and running a record store in the Bronx in New York City. She also worked as a teacher’s aide for students with learning disabilities and as a school bus driver.

After years of living mostly in obscurity, Martell attracted the attention of music writers, who began to take a second look at her career. Thoughtful profiles were written about Martell and her music in the Oxford American and Rolling Stone. In 2013 Martell got a shout-out in the cable TV movie A Country Christmas Story, starring Dolly Parton. In the movie, a biracial teenager who is an aspiring country singer learns about Martell’s story and other Black artists in country music. In 2021 Martell received the Equal Play Award at the CMT (Country Music Television) Music Awards, which recognized her career for providing “an eternally compelling case for why the music industry must always support marginalized artists.”

But the big game-changer came in 2024 with Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. The album includes “The Linda Martell Show,” a 28-second track in which Martell introduces the next song, “Ya Ya.” In the intro to the track “Spaghetti,” Martell says:

Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are. In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.

In 2024 Martell posted on Instagram, “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.”

Until Beyoncé’s song “Texas Hold ’Em” hit number one on the Billboard country chart in 2024, Martell’s “Color Him Father” was the only top-rated country song by a Black female artist in history. A documentary about Martell titled Bad Case of the Country Blues and directed by Marquia Thompson (Martell’s granddaughter) was scheduled to be released in 2024. In an interview segment for the documentary, Martell says of her pioneering career, “The thing that I did in country music, nobody can ever equal.”