Life, Music and Loss with The Delta Lady, Rita Coolidge, Part 1

thank you welcome to band center talks I'm Dominic Gerard and onstage with me is a woman who has a voice for the ages and stories for a lifetime Rita Coolidge was born in Tennessee her father was a pastor her mother was a teacher and music was just a small part of growing up in the Coolidge household I think that's fair to say hmm it's no surprise then I suppose that Rita made music her life from singing jingles at her radio station to singing backup with Delaney & Bonnie Joe Cocker and countless others and collaborating with Kris Kristofferson whom she married and then becoming a solo artist as well and the list just goes on and on fair enough that's fair miss coot has made music in many ways pop country jazz and also explored the music of our own Cherokee heritage Rita Coolidge has done if not at all then certainly most more than most of us could probably dream of and if that was enough you're also an avocado farmer in Southern Cal so top that it's my pleasure to welcome miss Rita Coolidge tube and center talks hello thank you thank you Sarita you're sitting here with me on stage at the Banff Centre small-town Banff Alberta surrounded by mountains you're a long way from Memphis Tennessee singing recording radio jingles for local radio stations do you remember any of those jingles actually actually no no don't because the company Pepper Tanner that I worked for primarily did the kind of radio spots so we mostly sang call letters more than jingles we did some jingles so your job was literally singing letters of the alphabet and well but you know like WABC and the or whatever it was in different towns and we would have the same music and just change the call letters so some days were extremely boring yeah but other days were a lot more fun because it's always fun to sing with people no matter what you're doing yeah well you were getting paid you were starting something you were doing fine right that was very important because I was right out of Florida State and had wanted to teach school when I went to Memphis where my parents lived at the time and I couldn't get a job teaching because there's a university there and all the teaching positions were filled by Memphis State University students so I went to my next love which was music and found a job you know wasn't really easy to make it make a living and music it still isn't for a lot of people and to be able to actually have security with a job and then that gave me the opportunity to start checking out the recording studios and the music scene in Memphis and off you went off I went I think it's kind of interesting that singing was a backup choice to teaching that well you actually when I graduated from Florida State I had a degree in art and in London my beg pardon visual art visual arts and minor in art history in English and I was offered an assistantship in the graduate work at Florida State which was very prestigious and they have a really great art department and so I went to the head of the art department and said I really and will not be happy with this position unless I give music a chance right I said if this is still here at a year I'm going to go to Memphis and I'm going to try to get in the music business and if I'm successful I'll come back in a year and let you know it'll be yes or no so I went back after that year and said I'm gonna go for the music that's what I did thanks very much but this thing's taken off I'm gonna go for it yeah yeah so when you first started on the music career what kind of ambitions did you have it first to just make a go at it and see where goes or you just charting a course four stars I don't think it was stars because I never got in the business because I thought it was a great singer because I wanted to be a star I did it because I love music right and I think that's reflected in all in the multiple genres of music that I've recorded throughout my career so I never thought I was great and really to kind of confirm that I went with a producer from Memphis up to Nashville and we drove up and met with some producers up there and they all turned me down and they said you're not star quality so you better go back to Memphis and get a job teaching so I would did go back to Memphis but I actually got back to Memphis and peper Tanner the jingle factory had started a record label which was pepper records and I was the first artist to record for pepper records which turned out to be another bonus because when I went to California some months later I had a regional hit only in Los Angeles a number-one single well did that blow your mind a little bit but yeah because I didn't know till I got there so I got I got there and and doors opened I was doing TV shows with people that I didn't know they were huge but I didn't know that because I didn't I hadn't lived there but it was it was really did open a lot of doors as far as people having credibility as a singer because I didn't have to go in an audition to do background work in Los Angeles because everybody knew my record and it was like sure especially Delaney and Bonnie yeah they took you on the road and you sang backup singer for them well I had met them in Memphis they were fulfilling their last commitment to Stax Records before they went on to do their Elektra first record with Elektra so I met them there met Leon Russell and Delaney and Bonnie and all of their band and before we left Memphis they had asked me to come to California Leon also asked me to come to California I think for different reasons but the Lady Bunny wanted me to come out and sing on their first album and that was really great do you look back on your career already and wonder about how much of it was controlled how much was just being right place at the right time Bob be it with a singing if it enough talent with you you know what I absolutely believed that I was in the right place at the right time and you know if divine intervention is a part of that and I believe that too it's also recognizing an opportunity when it's there and you know nuts not so much saying what can I get out of this but what can this experience be for me and what is that going to lead to because I think that we constantly grow as artists and when opportunities are there that offer growth then I think that I was always jumping right on that yeah and having a lot of fun too yeah no doubt speaking of growth chemical back a little bit you grew up in Tennessee right how important was music in the Coolidge household it was it was everything my grandmother who was born in 1878 was a big part of my life she was my maternal grandmother and she wrote songs and poems her entire life she went to Texas in a covered wagon when she was a little girl and her family her father played banjo they all somebody else in the family played fiddles so when they would camp at night these wagon trains would gather for safety the Stewart wagon provided the music for the dances at night so there was always music in her life which was handed down to us and I think it was really important for both of my grandmother's that we down the line make music about our family about our people which Priscilla and I did yeah I think I've heard you talk about how you priscilla thought or you thought me that she was the better singer of the two I said four syllable that you made Priscilla was the better singer for sure yeah Priscilla studied voice from the time she was 12 years old and went to the University of Tennessee on a full grace Moore scholarship so she really had was a trained vocalist I just did it because I liked it I never thought that I would have a better more successful career than Priscilla because she was Miss Nashville Miss Sigma Chi miss everything she was just gorgeous and I was just her scrawny little sister and how about your parents but role did they play in your musical upbringing well daddy as you mentioned was a a preacher and so there was music always in church and my mother played piano and organ in church and the my sisters there's a third sister Linda the three of us had a trio and then and we sang as a trio from the time I was two years old and then just as we grew up we kept saying and there were regular rehearsals with the ku girls we did talent shows in Nashville we were kids and mother was always once a week we gathered around the piano to learn another song and and that's where harmonies I think came in and where I learned harmony although I you know on some level I think we're some people are just born they were able to sing harmonies my granddaughter's can sing harmony if I'm in the car with my daughter and my three granddaughters and a song comes on that we all know it's full harmony nobody taught him they just do it huh you don't want me doing that um how important was the family's Cherokee heritage at that young age it's it was always important because we knew where we came from my mother was Cherokee and Scott my grandmother Laura Stewart who that was born in 1878 was a direct descendant of Mary Queen of Scots a mother held that very very highly in her heart but daddy never forgot where he came from and and I think he struggled as a lot I know he did and felt the sting of prejudice when he was a boy growing up in Texas and throughout the depression they actually lived and just a lean-to on the beach in Texas and didn't really have a home and so he really instilled in us the values that I think were so important for us to grow up with and they and that really was not to judge anybody by their position in society or the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual preference or anything all people are equal and that's what daddy taught to us as children and to be proud of our Cherokee heritage and he taught it in church as well during the civil rights movement my father stood up and said if any black man or woman or child walks into this church I expect you to seat them as you would any child of God and after church that day the Deacons got together and try to decide whether they were going to fire daddy or not and I remember that kind of like wow my dad really is really beliefs and stands up for what he teaches it feels like you've carried that your whole life up first from the time I was this big yeah let's go back to bong and Delaney back into the career a little bit what's it like on the road as a backup singer back then with Delaney Bonnie being on the road was just constant music it wasn't a constant party in the sense that a lot of bands a kind of the lifestyle a lot of bands on the road but Delaney and Bonnie were music we would sing if we were on a bus tour we would say on the bus while we're driving in the afternoon we would go to sound check when we got to the hotel woods check-in go to sound check and go go back change do the show go back to somebody's room after the show and sing more we sang all the time and it was just it was the greatest experience I think coming from Florida State and not being in that constant musical atmosphere with people from the south I was from the south and so were they so we shared that but sharing just that love of music and harmony and constantly do you know this song do you know that song and we would do old blues Tunes or pop tunes or whatever you know what just somebody would start singing and everybody joined in the guitars were going this was from the first time I worked with them through the European tour with Eric Clapton as the guitar player in the band George Harrison on the bus we always sang all day and all night do you think there's something of backup singing in that era that has been lost to how music is baked today absolutely I don't know if any of you are familiar with 20 feet from stardom which was a documentary winning film but there are so many background singers who literally don't I mean there were they had tremendous careers as background singers and so many of them like Darlene love you know ended up doing some cleaning houses because the the work fell out of background singing because you could record one chorus with one voice and then digitally stack those voices and move them to the next course and move them to the next course and suddenly voices real people were not vital anymore right so yeah it changed quite a bit changed a lot Claudia Lanier who was on the Joe Cocker tour is and sang with the Rolling Stones she she was brown sugar she still is but she sang with him for years and ended up going back to Los Angeles and teaching Spanish at a community college which she still does

Channel: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

Views: 151,083

Keywords: Rita Coolidge (Musical Artist), Rita Coolidge music, James Bond Theme (Composition), Music (TV Genre), Musician (Profession), Joe Cocker (Musical Artist), Kris Kristofferson (Musical Artist), Jingle (Musical Genre), Banff (City/Town/Village), Banff Centre (Venue), Banff Centre Talks, Delta Lady (Canonical Version)

Id: snJaLYk47EQ

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2015