Down the Road BRMT | Episode 4: Etta Baker Played the Piedmont Blues for Ninety Years

Etta Baker picked up her rag-time influenced style of fingerpicking at the age of 3 from her father. She became a master of the Piedmont Blues, influencing musicians like Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Etta practiced her two-finger picking style an hour every day in addition to raising nine children with her musician husband. After working 26 years at a Morganton textile mill, she quit at age 60 to become a professional musician, and at 78, she cut her first album. In 1991, she received the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship. Etta Baker died in 2006 at age of 93, but her legacy lives on with a statue at Morganton Municipal Auditorium.