Decades before Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” dominated the charts, another Black woman from Texas transcended genres with her hit country songs.
Her name was Esther Phillips, and she was best known for her R&B vocals. Tuesday marks what would have been her 90th birthday.
Phillips’ country song “Release Me” reached No. 8 on the Billboard chart in 1962 and led to her groundbreaking 1966 album “The Country Side of Esther.”
Journalist Michael Hall, who wrote about Phillips for Texas Monthly, calls it the “greatest country album you’ve never heard.”
“ I’ve known her music all my life. I used to love listening to her when I was a teenager, but I had no idea about the breadth of her music,” Hall said. “The thing that really knocked me out was discovering that she had made this country record in 1962. It wasn’t just a country record, it was a great country record.
6 questions with Michael Hall
Phillips was born in Texas and started singing professionally after she won a talent competition at 13. What was her rise to fame like?
“ She lived between her mom, who lived in [Los Angeles], in Watts, and her dad, who lived in Houston. They split up. So she would go back and forth, and her sister entered her into a talent contest because Esther was all the time singing around the house.
“She was just a kid and she won. And that led to Johnny Otis, the great band leader who lived out in LA, taking her on the road. She was 14 years old, and she had three No. 1 hits as a 14-year-old, and traveled all over the country, and was huge. But she also picked up some really bad habits, including heroin.”
One of her first hits was called “Double Crossing Blues,” and it’s hard to believe a 14-year-old is singing that song. How prodigious was her talent?
“ She had grown up singing in the church, but she really loved Dinah Washington and apparently would sing Dinah Washington, the great jazz singer, around the house all the time. So she had this amazing God-given talent, but then she also had these influences from the church to these great jazz singers.
“By the time she got up on that stage at 14 years old, she had the timing and the presence, and she knew how to let spaces live on in the music and not always go over the top. But man, she could go over the top, too.”
How did her struggle with addiction begin?
“ She was on the road. Initially, her mom went along with her and a tutor because she was only 14. But eventually, her mom and her tutor stopped going on the road.
“There were a bunch of men and jazz players in their 20s and 30s and, as jazz players want to do, they would light up a joint. And so she eventually started partaking.
“Esther had her adolescence robbed from her. I mean, she was basically taken on the road as a kid, and all of a sudden, she’s like 17 and didn’t have any friends. Her mom was not with her, and she would sometimes shoot up with heroin. And so by the time she was 18, she was a full-blown drug addict.”
How did she make the jump from touring with jazz and R&B musicians to making country music?
“ She winds up back in Houston. She’s in drug rehab, but she’s also playing in this after-hours club in Houston called Paul’s Sidewalk Cafe. And one day, she’s playing on the same bill with a jazz trio called The Bobby Doyle Three, and the bass player and singer is a young guy named Kenny Rogers.
“He’s really young. And he calls his brother, who’s older than him. His brother’s name is Leland. His brother is like this total record company hustler. He is trying to start a label, and Kenny says to Leland, ‘You gotta go check this woman out.’
“Leland goes and sees her and is knocked out and says, ‘Look, we’ve got to get you into the studio,’ and Esther’s ready for it.
“Two months before, Ray Charles had put out his groundbreaking record, the ‘Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.’ So what Leland does is say, ‘We’re going to make a country record.’
“So they bring in an arranger and they take her to Nashville and put her in a studio with all these A-list Nashville musicians, and they do ‘Release Me.’ And the record becomes this huge hit. They go back into the studio and make a whole album.
“There are 25 people in the studio, all musicians and one Black person, and it’s this 26-year-old woman, and she just sings every song with so much heart and soul. After some of the songs, the musicians put their instruments down and applaud for her. They’ve never heard anything like this before.”
You call her record ‘the greatest country album you’ve never heard.’ So what happened to it?
“‘Release Me’ was a big hit. So then they go back in, and they make the full album. And the full album goes nowhere. It’s even re-released by Atlantic Records a few years later, which was home to Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, and it also goes nowhere.
“So she does all kinds of things in the wake of this. She covers a Beatles song, ‘And I Love Him,’ which is a version of ‘And I Love Her.’ It becomes Paul McCartney’s favorite cover ever.
“ She covers Gil Scott-Heron, this jazz poet. She even has a disco hit in the [1970s]. She winds up touring a lot. She plays in Europe a lot, and she ultimately dies young because her body’s basically been worn out by all of her addictions.”
What do you think is her rightful place in music history?
“ I really do think she is one of the great jazz singers and country singers of all time. You can listen to her, and you can hear echoes of Billie Holiday, but you can also listen to her and hear echoes of Patsy Cline.
“I mean, nobody could sing pop like her. Nobody could sing sophisticated jazz like her. Nobody could sing disco like her. I mean, she sang everything.
“Esther did so many different kinds of things that, I don’t know, she never really found her niche, and we liked to classify people by niches. Esther never had a niche. She was just a great, great singer.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Grace Griffin produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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