The North Carolina-based blues singer grew up on a farm in the 1930s and started performing at a young age. Her mother taught her how to play guitar in the Piedmont blues style at around 9 years old. Hinton was an adept performer, dressing up her musical skill with theatric flourishes (learning how to play the guitar behind her back, for example).
“I played at camps, jailhouses, rest homes, lotta places,” she once said. She was a local musician up until 1978, when UNC-Chapel Hill folklorist Glenn Hinson asked her to contribute to an album that would be paired with a museum exhibit about 19th-century African-Americans. In 1996, she put out a proper album titled Honey Babe: Blues, Folk Tunes and Gospel From North Carolina. The song titles are gloriously eye-catching: “When You Kill the Chicken Save Me the Head,” “Lima Beans” and, of course, the title track “Honey Babe,” which is the first song she ever learned to play.
The future icon was born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Alabama in 1930. She was classically trained, but favored folk music, a nimbler genre that could directly express her lyrics and sentiment. Her voice was broad and sonorous, a booming sound that gave her music a special depth. She was the great among greats; Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Tracy Chapman, and more all cited her as an influence. Her music has a hagiographic quality. She was often nicknamed the “soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement,” a title she more than earned after marching with Martin Luther King Jr. and being name-checked as a favorite by leaders like Rosa Parks.
The gospel singer was born around 1920 into a sharecropping family in Alabama. Fluker favored gospel music, and was moved to preach after having a vision of Jesus under a pecan tree.
