ROARING FORK BROADCASTING COMPANY
Shemekia Copeland’s earliest memories of music are of her father Johnny Copeland sitting in the family’s apartment in New York, playing a guitar and singing.
“My dad had an Ovation (guitar) and he would sit around the house in his underwear playing guitar and that was my earliest memories of music, and I'd be singing along with him,” she said in an Aspen Daily News interview. “He would mostly play his songs but sometimes they would be Jimmy Reed or Hank Williams’ songs. He loved T. Bone Walker but mostly he was writing and working stuff out on his own.”
Copeland will play two shows, at 6:30 p.m. and 8:45 p.m., at the Aspen Art Museum rooftop on Saturday as part of the JAS Cafe Summer Series. She will be joined Saturday by Arthur Neilson and Ken “Willie” Scandlyn on guitars, Kevin Jenkins on bass and Dan Hickey on drums. Visit jazzaspensnowmass.org for more information, including ticket availability.
Copeland used to go to her father’s gigs as a child and one day when she was 9, he called her up on stage to perform with him. Johnny Copeland, a Louisiana native who made his mark in music growing up in Texas, was a renowned blues guitarist and singer who died in 1997.
“It was a song of his called ‘Stingy,’” she recalled. “‘I got a guy as sweet as he can be, the only fault he got that I can see is that he's too stingy with his love for me.’ I would join him on stage every now and then after that. It was Harlem during the ’90s; everyone was listening to hip-hop records in our neighborhood, but I was in the house listening to Ruth Brown.”
When pressed for some of her other influences, Copeland mentioned some other big names that are forever etched in the annals of blues and soul.
“For me, the Etta James song ‘At Last’ is the ultimate. There’s never been another song like it. But Koko Taylor and Tina Turner are singers I admire. I’ve been influenced by a lot of male singers too. I always wanted to have a big belting voice. I like a lot of the gospel male singers and I love Sam Cooke.
“I identify myself as a blues singer that pulls from all American roots music. So you'll hear gospel, country, bluegrass, soul, r&b. You're gonna hear everything in there because I'm a blues singer that just loves American roots music.”
Copeland began to pursue a singing career in earnest at age 16. Her father’s health deteriorated due to heart disease and he took Shemekia out on the road with him. She recorded her first album “Turn the Heat Up” for Alligator Records when she was 19. It announced her as a major new talent in the blues, a genre that wasn’t generating many young artists at the time.
Copeland hit the road in support of the record and in her own words, “I've been on the road for over 25 years since then.”
The tenor of her records changed after her seventh record, 2015’s “Outskirts of Love.” In 2017, she gave birth and having a son changed the way she looked at the world. Her next record, 2018’s “America’s Child,” marked a shift in her perspective.
“Having a kid really changed me,” Copeland said. “So when I did that record (“America’s Child”) that was the shift in my career where everything changed for me. Because instead of complaining about everything that was going on in the world I really wanted to make it a better world for him to live in.”
In 2020, Copeland recorded the album “Uncivil War.” The title track is an anthem for people of the world to come together and work through their problems.
“He says left, she says right,” the song goes. “One says peace, the other says fight. One hand's a palm the other's a fist, another chance for love just got missed. Uncivil war, uncivil war, how long must we fight this uncivil war? The same old wounds we opened before, nobody wins an uncivil war.”
“‘Uncivil War’ was about the conditions we were living in at the time,” Copeland said. “George Floyd had just happened, and there was all this divisiveness and fighting, so I wrote a song about bringing people together, and hopefully having people realize that we're really all one in the same and we need to try to create less divisiveness.”
Copeland’s 2022 record, “Done Come Too Far” continued thematically along the lines of “America’s Child.” One of the songs, “The Talk,” concerns the discussion Black parents have with their children about how to handle oneself in the event they get stopped by police: “Got to have the talk, you might do nothin’ wrong, the next moment you'll be gone, got to have the talk.”
The great Mavis Staples told Blues Music Magazine that she was grateful Copeland has been tackling difficult themes in her last several records. “I am so happy that Shemekia is delivering these songs that the world needs to hear,” Staples said. “Her voice is strong and soulful and her message is from the heart.”
Copeland is releasing her 11th studio record “Blame it on Eve” on Aug. 30. “I'm very excited about the new album because it's definitely a much lighter record,” Copeland said. “Of course, I'm dealing with issues like women's rights and things like that but it's a lighter, more fun record.”
Over the course of her career, Copeland has won several W.C. Handy Blues Awards, including Song of the Year, Blues Album of the Year and Contemporary Female Artist of the Year. She also received the 2021 Blues Music Award for B.B. King Entertainer of the Year.
“It's a wonderful thing to get an award for doing something that you love to do,” Copeland said. You know, it's really great. But I definitely try not to put too much stock in it because you know, what are you gonna do if you don't get them? You gotta keep on keeping on, no matter what.”
Asked what she hopes someone might take away from one of her shows, Copeland said, “I hope that people will experience a roller coaster of emotions. Some of the best shows that I've been to are shows where I've laughed, I've cried, I've danced — I went through every emotion and that's what I want to do for my audience.”
If she had to describe the blues to someone who was unfamiliar with it, Copeland said she would tell them this: “The blues is the truth. It's a feeling. it's emotion, it's life. It's everything.”