Linda Martell, the first Black woman to perform solo at the Grand Ole Opry, will be honored at the 2021 Country Music Television Music Awards. Siloed into obscurity during the height of her career in the 70s, Martell faced the predominantly white industry’s racism to pioneer a path for Black country artists and decades later, the foremother is finally being honored for her historic strides.
At the awards on June 9, the 80-year-old will receive the CMT Equal Play Award. The tribute will be presented by the legend-in-the-making Mickey Guyton, who became the first solo Black woman nominated for a country Grammy award in 2021. Martell released her lone album Color Me Country in 1970 and its eponymous track rose to No. 22 on the Billboard country music charts. In spite of her auspicious potential as the next breakout star, she endured taunting from the predominantly white, mainstream audiences she performed in front of and was ultimately exiled from the spotlight. “You’d be singing and they’d shout out names and you know the names they would call you,” Martell recounted in an interview with Rolling Stone. Subsequently, her record label shelved her album and finding a new deal was out of reach.
After white country listeners decried Lil Nas X’s entrance into the genre, the discourse of the genre’s vast disregard of its Black roots was reawakened. Although Black country artists are still navigating largely uncharted waters, the territory is little more congenial in comparison to strife Martell wrestled with in an era where Black voices were stifled. Just this past year at the ACM Awards, Guyton paved the way as the first Black woman to ever host the show, Kane Brown became the first Black solo artist to win ACM Award for Video of the Year and Jimmie Allen won New Male Artist of the Year as the first Black artist to ever do so.
