The applause was thin, punctuated by jeers. In August 1969, Linda Martell stood backstage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, preparing to become the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. She had already broken one barrier – her debut single, “Color Him Father,” had reached number 22 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, making her the first Black female artist to chart in country music. Now she was about to walk onto the most sacred stage in the genre. The audience, overwhelmingly white and male, did not want her there.
Martell would later recall the experience in a 2005 documentary, Waiting in the Wings: “No matter how good your performance was, no matter how well your record was doing, the colour of the skin stopped you from working in a lot of a great places.” It was a truth she would learn repeatedly over the next five years, as the country music industry celebrated her talent while ensuring she could never succeed.
From Gospel Pews to the Air Force Base
Thelma Bynem was born on 4 June 1941 in Leesville, South Carolina, one of five children raised by Clarence Bynem, a Baptist minister and sharecropper, and Willie Mae Bynem, who worked in a chicken slaughterhouse. The family listened to country music on Nashville radio station WLAC, and her father sang Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” around the house. Music was a constant, but it was the gospel tradition that gave Martell her first audience – she began singing in the choir at St. Mark Baptist Church at age five.
At sixteen, she formed an R&B trio called the Anglos with her sister Evelyn and a cousin, performing in clubs across South Carolina. The group recorded a handful of singles in the 1960s but never broke through. It was during a solo performance at the Charleston Air Force Base in 1969 that Martell’s career changed direction. She had been performing R&B, but on impulse, she sang a country song. The crowd’s reaction caught the attention of William “Duke” Rayner, a Nashville promoter, and Shelby Singleton, the executive who ran Plantation Records.
Singleton signed Martell to a one-year deal on 16 May 1969. Within a week, she was in the studio recording a cover of “Color Him Father,” a song originally recorded by the R&B group the Winstons. The track was released days later and climbed to number 22 on the country chart, spending ten weeks in the Top 40. It remains the highest-charting single by a Black female country artist in history – a record that stood unbroken for 55 years until Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” topped the chart in 2024.
“A Little Bit Country and a Little Bit R&B”
Martell’s vocal style defied easy categorisation. Ebony magazine described her voice as having “gutsy, emotional soul,” rooted in gospel and R&B, while Billboard praised her authenticity: “Linda impresses as a female Charley Pride. She has a terrific style and a true feeling for a country lyric.” Writer David Browne, who profiled her for Rolling Stone, noted that she delivered “Color Him Father” with “a little bit country and a little bit R&B.”
Martell understood the storytelling power of country music. “Country music tells a story,” she explained. “When you choose a song and you can feel it, that’s what made me feel great about what I was singing.” Her 1970 album, Color Me Country, climbed to number 40 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and produced three charting singles: “Color Him Father,” “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” (number 33), and “Bad Case of the Blues” (number 58). The album earned her appearances on Hee Haw and package shows with Waylon Jennings and Hank Snow.
Yet the success masked a deeper hostility. At nearly every live show, audiences shouted racial slurs. A promoter in Beaumont, Texas, cancelled her appearance after discovering she was Black. At the Grand Ole Opry, an executive tried to correct her pronunciation of her own lyrics. She refused to change. “He wasn’t too happy about it,” she later said. “But I did anyway.”
The Colour Line Nashville Drew
Country music had been marketed as “hillbilly music” to white audiences since its commercialisation in the 1920s. While Black musicians had always been part of the genre’s development – from DeFord Bailey, who performed at the Opry in the 1920s, to Charley Pride, who was rising to stardom by the late 1960s – the industry’s mainstream remained overwhelmingly white. Martell’s gender compounded the racial barrier. The few women who achieved success were expected to conform to particular images and behaviours.
Her label, Plantation Records, was itself a symbol of the era’s contradictions. The name derived from slave plantations in the American South. When Martell confronted Singleton about it, he denied any racial intent. She told him, “What you are telling me is that Black people belonged on the plantation!”
The business conflicts that followed were devastating. In May 1970, Rayner sued Martell over commission rates. Singleton managed to resolve the dispute, but he was already shifting his attention to Jeannie C. Riley, whose “Harper Valley PTA” had become a massive hit. Singleton told Martell directly that he was prioritising Riley. After her one-year contract expired, Martell left Plantation, but when she attempted to sign with another label, Singleton threatened to sue. The pattern repeated. She was effectively blacklisted, her reputation destroyed, and her mainstream country career was over by 1974.
The Wilderness Years
Martell spent the next two decades in a nomadic existence, singing in bars and clubs, working on a cruise ship in California, running a record store in the Bronx, and performing with an R&B cover band in Florida. She worked in public education to support herself. In the 1990s, she returned to South Carolina.
Her story might have been lost entirely if not for a gradual scholarly and journalistic reassessment of Black artists in country music. In 2020, Beyoncé featured Martell on the visual album Black Is King, introducing her to a new generation. In 2021, the CMT Music Awards honoured her with the Equal Play Award, presented by Mickey Guyton, who had recently become the first Black woman nominated for a country Grammy. “I didn’t even know she existed,” Guyton admitted. “I felt really bad when I discovered that I didn’t know.”
Rissi Palmer, who named her Apple Music podcast Color Me Country after Martell’s album, told NPR she was “paying homage to the foundation on which my house is built, and that is Linda Martell.” Kane Brown, another Black country artist, reflected: “Colour was a thing back then. It’s still a thing today, but it was worse back then. She was so brave.”
Genres Are a Funny Little Concept
The most significant chapter of Martell’s rediscovery came in March 2024, when Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter, her eighth studio album. Martell appeared on two tracks: “Spaghettii,” where she delivers the opening line – “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” – and “The Linda Martell Show.” The feature earned Martell her first Grammy nomination.
The album was a deliberate reclamation of country music’s Black roots, inspired by Beyoncé’s own experience of feeling unwelcome in Nashville. “This ain’t a country album,” Beyoncé wrote on Instagram. “This is a Beyoncé album.” By including Martell, she was not merely paying tribute; she was making an argument about who owns the genre.
Martell’s influence extends beyond symbolic recognition. Her courage opened doors for artists like Mickey Guyton, Kane Brown, and Rissi Palmer, who have spoken explicitly about her impact. A documentary, Bad Case of the Country Blues, has been in production, promising to tell her story in full for the first time.
The Unfinished Reckoning
Linda Martell’s career illuminates both the possibilities and the limits of barrier-breaking in American culture. She achieved things that had previously been impossible for a Black woman in country music. Yet the industry’s response – initial celebration followed by marginalisation, then erasure – demonstrates that individual achievement cannot overcome systemic prejudice without structural change.
Her exclusion was not a reflection of her abilities but of the industry’s assumptions about race, gender, and audiences. Country music’s racial homogeneity was not a natural phenomenon but a product of deliberate choices by record executives, promoters, and radio programmers who determined who could record, perform, and be promoted.
Today, at 84, Martell is finally receiving the recognition she was denied for decades. But her story raises an uncomfortable question: how many other Black women were similarly talented, similarly determined, and similarly erased? The answer, like the history of country music itself, remains incomplete.
For more on the genre’s evolving landscape, explore our Music coverage. To read about the broader cultural shifts reshaping contemporary Britain, visit our Culture section.
