Guitarist Etta Baker quietly enjoyed one of the blues' most enduring careers, working in almost total obscurity and recording only on the rarest of occasions while honing her craft throughout the greater part of the 20th century. Born in Caldwell County, NC, on March 31, 1913, she was the product of a musical family, taking up the guitar as a child and learning from her father and other relatives traditional blues and folk songs. Over time, Baker emerged among the foremost practitioners of acoustic Piedmont guitar fingerpicking, an open-tuned style not far removed from bluegrass banjo picking; however, for decades only relatives and friends ever heard her play, as she confined her performances solely to family gatherings and parties. She finally made her initial recordings in 1956, joining her father and other family members on a field recording titled Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians; she again faded into willful obscurity, however, raising her nine children and toiling in a textile mill. Finally, while in her sixties -- at an age at which most performers consider retirement -- Baker finally began pursuing music professionally, hitting the folk and blues festival circuit. In 1991 -- 35 years after her debut recording -- she issued the album One-Dime Blues and continued performing live throughout the decade to follow, returning in 1999 with Railroad Bill. Baker died on September 23, 2006, at the age of 93 just months before her final album was to be released. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide
She was born Etta Lucille Reid in Caldwell County, North Carolina, of African American, Native American, and European American heritage. She played both the 6-string and 12-string forms of the acoustic guitar, as well as the five-string banjo. Baker played the Piedmont Blues for ninety years, starting at the age of three when she could not even hold the guitar properly. She was taught by her father, Boone Reid, who was also a long time player of the Piedmont Blues on several instruments. Etta Baker was first recorded in the summer of 1956 when she and her father happened across folk singer Paul Clayton while visiting Cone Mansion in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, near their home in Morganton, NC. Baker's father asked Clayton to listen to his daughter playing her signature "One Dime Blues". Clayton was impressed and arrived at the Baker house with his tape recorder the next day, recording several songs.
Baker had nine children, one of whom was killed in the Vietnam War in 1967, the same year her husband died. 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.
Discography
1956 : Instrumental Music From the Southern Appalachians (1956, Tradition Records; reissued 1997)
1990 : One Dime Blues
1998 : The North Carolina Banjo Collection (various artists) (1998, Rounder)
2005 : Carolina Breakdown with Cora Phillips (Music Maker 56)
2006 : Knoxville Rag with Kenny Wayne Shepherd (CD Title: "10 Days Out- Blues From The Backroads", it also includes a DVD that shows Kenny & Etta playing guitar in her kitchen), Reprise Records, 2006. ISBN 0 9632-49294-2 0
