If you’re not a country music aficionado, the name Linda Martell may not be familiar to you. But after decades out of the spotlight, the trailblazing singer is finally getting her flowers.
Martell joins fellow country music legends like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson as a featured collaborator on Beyoncé’s eighth studio album, Cowboy Carter. (She specifically appears on “Spaghettii” and “The Linda Martell Show.”) “I am proud that @beyonce is exploring her country music roots,” Martell said on Instagram after the album dropped on March 29. “What she is doing is beautiful, and I’m honored to be a part of it. It’s Beyoncé, after all!”
Like Beyoncé, Martell is known for blazing her own path in the music industry. As one of the first Black female country artists to achieve success in the 1960s, the now-82-year-old singer made history with the release of her first and only album, Color Me Country. Despite the album’s critical success, Martell faced terrible obstacles in her career. “You’d be singing and they’d shout out names and you know the names they would call you,” she said in a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone.
Beyoncé has similarly revealed that Cowboy Carter “was born out of an experience that [she] had years ago where [she] did not feel welcomed,” and fans have speculated that she is referring to her 2016 performance with the Chicks at the Country Music Association Awards.
Throughout the album, Beyoncé contends with the adversities Black artists face in the country music scene. As Martell says in her narration at the opening of “Spaghettii”: “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? / In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand / But in practice—well, some may feel confined.”
Ahead, we highlight what to know about Martell and her legacy.
She is from South Carolina.
Born Thelma Bynem, the singer was born and raised in South Carolina at a time of intense segregation. Her father, Clarence, was a sharecropper, while her mother, Willie Mae, worked at a chicken slaughterhouse.
Alongside her family, Martell would sing gospel at their Baptist church, eventually forming a musical trio called the Anglos with her sister and cousin in the late ’50s, according to Rolling Stone. After a DJ named Charles “Big Saul” Greene saw young Thelma perform at school, he encouraged her to change her stage name to Linda Martell.
She started out as an R&B artist.
Linda Martell and the Anglos released “A Little Tear (Was Falling From My Eyes)” in 1962, followed by a few other singles, including “Lonely Hours.” Ultimately, the tracks did not sell. As Martell later recalled to Rolling Stone, “We learned that the music business is most difficult and you can really, really be fleeced.”
The group eventually disbanded, but Martell continued to sing in clubs. She was eventually discovered by music manager William “Duke” Rayner, who then introduced her to record producer Shelby Singleton Jr. In 1969, Singleton encouraged Martell to pursue a genre pivot. “I was a little bit shocked,” Martell told Rolling Stone. “I was mostly doing pop. But he said, ‘You gotta go country.’ ”
She released her first and last album in 1970.
Martell released Color Me Country in 1970. The project reached no. 40 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and delivered three charting singles. In particular, “Color Him Father” (a cover of the Winstons track of the same name) saw success on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, reaching no. 22.
“Country music tells a story,” Martell told Rolling Stone. “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.”
Her success broke barriers for other Black country artists. She became the first Black female solo artist to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, and she also performed on long-running country variety show Hee Haw.
Although she made history, Martell faced near-constant taunts and jeers about her race onstage and backstage. “A lot of times, you feel like saying, ‘Okay, look here, I don’t wanna hear that. 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,” she told Rolling Stone. “When you’re playing to an all-white audience—because Lord Jesus, they are prejudiced—you learn to not say too much. You can carry it a little too far if you’re correcting somebody. So you learn how not to do that.”
Singleton began to shift his focus away from Martell and toward then-rising country singer Jeannie C. Riley, leading to Martell leaving his label. When she began recording new tracks for another label, Singleton reportedly threatened to sue the company. “He blackballed me,” she told Rolling Stone. “You heard the term? Well, he did that. So no one else would record me. It ruined my reputation in country music. Shelby had a lot of power during that time.”
She worked a variety of jobs after her country music career ended.
After leaving Singleton’s label, Martell went on to work a variety of different jobs. She sang on a cruise ship, opened an R&B and disco record shop in the Bronx, drove a bus for the Batesburg-Leesville school district in South Carolina, and worked in a classroom of students with learning disabilities.
She recalled some of her students listening to one of her old records. “They were amazed,” Martell said to Rolling Stone. “They said, ‘Who’s that lady? Is that you?’ ‘Yeah, baby, that’s me.’ ”
As an associate editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com, Chelsey keeps a finger on the pulse on all things celeb news. She also writes on social movements, connecting with activists leading the fight on workers' rights, climate justice, and more. Offline, she’s probably spending too much time on TikTok, rewatching Emma (the 2020 version, of course), or buying yet another corset.
