Even when Shemekia Copeland was a student at Teaneck High School in New Jersey, she was already committed to the blues. Born into Blues royalty (her father was blues guitarist Johnny Copeland), Copeland has become perhaps the most prominent woman performing blues and roots music today.
“It was always going to be the blues,” she said when I reached out to her, “not any other genre.” That made her different in among her Teaneck “Highwaymen” classmates, who were more into hip hop in the 90s. “I was definitely different,” she told me. “I marched to the beat of my own drum, but I didn’t get teased for it.”
Shemekia (she doesn’t pronounce the “i”) says she grew up all around New York, where she was born, before her family landed in New Jersey. After living in Chicago for a number of years, she now calls California home.
She said her father was a huge influence, with his album Flyin’ High among her favorites. Growing up, she said, she looked up to Koko Taylor, whom she described as an “amazing mentor.” But she says she was also influenced by Ruth Brown and Bonnie Raitt and also names James Cotton, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, B.B. King, Robert Cray and Taj Mahal among her primary influences.
Copeland is hitting the road in support of her new album, Done Come Too Far, which has a strong civil rights and social justice message.
“For me,” she said, “it’s about storytelling and getting out information and being hopeful. That’s what’s important. I don’t shy away from things that need to get discussed. I want to open up that conversation because that’s how we learn.”
She said Done Come Too Far is the third in a trilogy of recent albums she has released since the birth of her son. She said the birth helped her to refocus her artistic energy, concentrating on her music as “little pieces of art that my kid can be proud of.”
The first of the trilogy, America’s Child, released in 2018, featured a duet with the late John Prine, who died of COVID-19 in April 2020.
“I’m so grateful I got a chance to work with him,” she said. She said she initially met Prine backstage at a festival and was nervous to meet him, but the homespun Prine broke the ice by simply saying, “I like your shoes,” and that struck up a conversation.
Like America’s Child and its follow-up, Uncivil War, the excellent Done Come Too Far features a blend of blues and Americana, even including a bouyant country song, “Fell in Love with a Honky.” But, she assured me, she didn’t “fall in love with a honky in a honky-tonk bar” as the song says.
“The only thing that’s true about that album is that my husband is white,” she laughed. But she said he’s “a metalhead” who – like her – listens sometimes to Americana artists like Jason Isbell.
About the author: Bill Wilcox is a roots music enthusiast recently relocated from the Washington, DC area to Philadelphia, PA and back again.