Etta Baker born 31 March 1913

Etta Baker (March 31, 1913 – September 23, 2006) was an American Piedmont blues guitarist and singer from North Carolina who quietly enjoyed one of the blues' most enduring careers, working in almost total obscurity and recording only on the rarest of occasions while honing her craft throughout the greater part of the 20th century.

She was born Etta Lucille Reid in Caldwell County, North Carolina, of African-American, Native American, and European-American heritage. Baker began playing guitar at the age of three. She was taught by her father, Boone Reid, a long-time player of the Piedmont blues on several instruments. He was her only musical instructor. She played both the 6-string and the 12-string acoustic guitar and the five-string banjo. Baker played the Piedmont blues for nearly ninety years.

The family moved to Keysville, Virginia, in 1916. There were eight Reid children, four girls and four boys. All but one survived into adulthood. Each of her siblings played instruments. Occasionally, Baker, her father, and her sister, Cora, would play together at dances on Saturday night. Boone Reid worked a series of jobs during the 1910s and 1920s, occasionally taking work in factories and shipyards in other states. The rest of the family lived with an uncle. By the time Etta Reid was 14 years old, the entire family worked on a tobacco farm in southern Virginia, which meant that they were together. She dropped out of school after tenth grade. For decades only relatives and friends ever heard her play, as she confined her performances solely to family gatherings and parties. 

                    Here's "One Dime Blues" from above album.

                                 

Baker was first recorded in the summer of 1956, after she and her father happened across the folksinger Paul Clayton while visiting the Cone mansion, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, near their home in Morganton. Baker's father asked Clayton to listen to his daughter playing her signature "One Dime Blues". Clayton was impressed and arrived at the Baker house with his tape recorder the next day, recording several songs. Clayton recorded five solo guitar pieces by Baker, which were released as part of the 1956 album Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, one of the first commercially released recordings of African American banjo music. Baker was not monetarily compensated for these early recordings. She stayed on at her factory job in Morganton, N.C., for some 50 years. Only after working with the Music Maker label later in life was she able to get rights back for this music.

Etta’s two-finger style (thumb and index finger) of playing guitar follows in the tradition of other great Piedmont guitarists and fellow North Carolinians like Elizabeth Cotten and Gary Davis.  Known for her beautiful arrangements and driving rhythm, Etta’s guitar repertoire ranges from late 19th-century parlor music to intimation of blues music styles that would define the post-World War II urban electric blues that became popular in Chicago and Detroit and gave birth to Rock ‘n Roll.

Baker said that she got inspiration for chords through her dreams, stating that it is "like putting a crossword puzzle together". Baker influenced many well-known musical artists, including Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. In 1991 -- 35 years after her debut recording -- she issued the album One-Dime Blues and continued performing live throughout the decade to follow, returning in 1999 with Railroad Bill. Baker received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1989, a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991, and the North Carolina Award in 2003. She was nominated for several Blues Music Awards (formerly the W. C. Handy Blues Awards): in the Traditional Blues Female Artist category in 1987 and 1989, and her album Railroad Bill in the Acoustic Album category in 2000. Along with her sister, Cora Phillips, she received the Brown-Hudson Folklore Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society in 1982.

Etta married Lee Baker, a piano player, in 1936 after courting for six years. They had nine children, one of whom was killed in the Vietnam War in 1967, the same year her husband died. For a while after these deaths, she stopped playing, but found she missed the consolation the blues brought her. She last lived in Morganton, North Carolina, and died September 23, 2006, at the age of 93 in Fairfax, Virginia, while visiting a daughter who had suffered a stroke.

(Edited from Wikipedia & the Etta Baker Project)