Martell was successful but was in a genre dominated by White producers, musicians and fans, said Alice Randall, a professor of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University and author of the upcoming book “My Black Country.” Audiences shouted racial slurs and other hateful words during nearly every live show, Martell’s website states. What turned out to be her last single “Bad Case of the Blues” underperformed, and a spat with her label, Plantation Records, led the owners to blackball her, an accusation that’s disputed.
“And then she just disappears,” Randall said.
Martell’s collapse didn’t make sense, Randall added. She was an attractive singer with a sweet voice and impressive vocal range who chose her songs well.
“She has all the pieces,” Randall said. “She’s very much kind of the Black girl next door.”
Martell spent the next couple of decades bouncing around the country trying to find a second act but never matched her initial success in Nashville, according to Rolling Stone. Now 82, she lives in South Carolina with her family.
Although Martell struggled to reclaim her stardom, she influenced other Black women trying to break into country music, Randall said. That included Rissi Palmer, who in 2007 became the first Black woman to climb the Billboard country music charts as an individual artist since Martell, and Rhiannon Giddens, a banjo player featured on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em.”
“Linda Martell is a beacon of light to all these women,” Randall said.
But she was almost unknown to everyone else, and so was her music, Randall said, adding that when she started researching Martell in 2009, she struggled to find a copy of her album. Around then, someone uploaded it in its entirety to YouTube, exposing new generations to it for the first time.
The increase in exposure continued for more than a decade. In a 2013 Lifetime movie “A Country Christmas Story,” which starred Dolly Parton, a character explains Martell’s importance to the protagonist, a biracial teenager who wants to be a country singer. At the 2021 Country Music Television Awards, Martell was given the Equal Play Award, her career providing “an eternally compelling case for why the music industry must always support marginalized artists.” In honoring her, the CMT noted that “the groundbreaking African American female country vocalist [was finally getting] ‘Sent her flowers’ after a bittersweetly important career.”
Then, on Friday, Beyoncé upped the ante, exposing millions to Martell in one fell swoop, which came a little more than a month after she became the first Black woman to reach No. 1 on the Billboard country music charts.