Blues legend Etta Baker passes on

Acclaimed Piedmont-style guitarist, singer was 93

Etta Baker, legendary Piedmont blueswoman and an inspiration to generations of guitar players, passed away Saturday. She was 93.

No cause of death was given, but Baker had been in failing health for years.

Baker played Piedmont blues, a style that drew from the clattery rhythms of bluegrass as well as blues. In spite of her declining health, she kept making music until she died. She appears on million-selling blues-rock guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd's next album, due out in November, and she has an album of banjo tunes coming out next year.

"She embodied everything we love about the South," said Tim Duffy, who worked with Baker through his Music Maker Relief Foundation.

"She was strong, warm, witty, gentle; a gardener and also the world's premiere Piedmont-style blues guitarist. ... Anybody who has picked up acoustic finger-style guitar has been influenced by Etta, whether they know it or not."

Baker's ill health didn't stop her from tending to family. She died in Fairfax, Va., while visiting one of her daughters who had suffered a stroke.

"She just had to go, she just had to see my sister," said Darlene Davis, another daughter who lives next door to Baker's house in Morganton. "She was a great mother and a tower of strength for the family. We always looked up to her."

Baker grew up in a musical family in Western North Carolina and first made her mark in 1956. That year, she appeared on a compilation album called "Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians," which would be enormously influential on the growing folk revival -- especially Baker's versions of "Railroad Bill" and "One-Dime Blues." Musicians who could keep up with her rapid finger-picking on "One-Dime Blues" were said to be "one-diming it."

Bluesman Taj Mahal, who recorded an album with Baker in 2004, was among those who found inspiration from Baker's rhythmic finger-picking.

"I came upon that record in the '60s," Mahal said. "It didn't have any pictures, so I had no idea who she was until I got to meet her years later. But man, that chord in 'Railroad Bill,' that was just the chord. It just cut right through me. I can't even describe how deep that was for me, just beautiful stuff."

While her music inspired Mahal, Bob Dylan and other younger musicians, Baker was busy raising a family that eventually numbered nine children.

She had to cope with a fair amount of tragedy in the 1960s. Her husband suffered a debilitating stroke in 1964, the same year Baker had a serious car accident that killed one of her grandsons.

Then in the span of one month in 1967, her husband died and one of her sons was killed in the Vietnam War.

After working for 26 years at a textile mill in Morganton, Baker quit to pursue a career as a professional musician -- at age 60.

She was a hit on the international folk-festival circuit, earning awards including a 1991 Folk Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. And she made an impression on almost everyone she met.

"I remember being at this banjo [festival] one time, and I wanted to have my picture taken with her," Mahal recalled. "And she looked at me kinda sideways and asked, 'Now you ain't gonna get in no trouble with me, are ya?' And she was 80-some years old."

Baker stayed on the road well into her 80s, but she finally had to quit touring because of heart problems. By this year, she no longer had the strength to play guitar.

So she put most of her musical energy into playing banjo. Wayne Martin, who plays fiddle on her upcoming banjo collection, reports that Baker was still playing great a month ago when he saw her for the last time.

"I consider her to be one of the most important traditional artists of our lifetime," Martin said. "She meant a lot to me personally, and to North Carolina. She touched hundreds of thousands if not millions of people with her music. It's amazing that she raised nine kids, attending to their needs, then had a career that didn't even start until she was in her 60s, and it touched all these people. What she did resonated with many, many people."