Music

Coolidge to lift festival higher

Rita Coolidge headlines the annual Ozark Folk Festival with a Saturday night concert in Eureka Springs.
Rita Coolidge headlines the annual Ozark Folk Festival with a Saturday night concert in Eureka Springs.

Many don't include Rita Coolidge among the considerable list of folk singers who got their start in the 1960s, even though she began singing folk songs, as her Tennessee ancestors had done for eons.

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Rita Coolidge performs Oct. 10 at the Ozark Folk Festival in Eureka Springs

Now, after decades of singing pop, rock, R&B and country, she has come full circle as the headliner this weekend at Eureka Springs' Ozark Folk Festival.

Music

Ozark Folk Festival: Rita Coolidge

7:30 p.m. Saturday, The Auditorium, 36 S. Main St., Eureka Springs

Tickets: $30-$85

(479) 253-7333

ozarkfolkfestival.c…

"My grandmother was my biggest influence," she says. "She was of Scottish and Cherokee heritage, and was a descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots.

"She sang around me all the time, wrote poems and songs and lived to be 104, and always kept her clarity. Music was always valued in my life."

Coolidge, 70, grew up in Lafayette, Tenn., went to college in Florida and made her way to Memphis, where Delaney & Bonnie Bramlett discovered her singing commercial jingles. They convinced her to go with them to Los Angeles, where singing background vocals put her on her path to stardom. She joined Joe Cocker's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" tour and appeared on the subsequent album.

Her version of Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett's song "Superstar" helped make her one. Russell was inspired to write a song just for her: "Delta Lady."

She met Kris Kristofferson in 1970; they married three years later. They recorded several albums of duets and won two Grammy Awards for Best County Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal -- in 1974 for "From the Bottle to the Bottom" and in 1976 for "Lover Please."

Known more as a singer than a songwriter, her best-known hits were cover versions of Jackie Wilson's "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher," The Temptations' "The Way You Do the Things You Do," Boz Scaggs' "We're All Alone" and Peggy Lee's "Fever."

She told the Folk Alliance conference in Kansas City, Mo., in April about singing since she was 2 years old, her roots in folk music, and performances as a solo guitarist and in two folk bands.

"I have a daughter, Casey, from my marriage to Kris, and she is a ballerina and teaches that," she says proudly, "and she sings, plays banjo and has three daughters of her own."

Her autobiography, Delta Lady, which she is co-writing with Michael Walker (author of Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood), is due out in 2016.

"I start with my childhood and my life leading up to the time I spent in Memphis after graduating from Florida State University," she says. "I go into the scenes I was involved in, before music became something in huge arenas and stadiums, and the book ends when Kris and I divorced.

"I didn't keep a diary, but I have my memory and all of my cognitive abilities, unaffected by age or disease or anything."

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The 68th annual Ozark Folk Festival runs Wednesday-Saturday.

Local women will display beauty and talent as they compete to be Folk Festival Queen at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the auditorium. The Third Grade Hedgehoppers from the town's elementary school will perform a folk dance.

Cutty Rye will perform for dancers at the Barefoot Ball, 7 p.m. Thursday at the Barefoot Ballroom, Basin Park Hotel, 12 Spring St. Tickets are $10.

An afternoon of free music in Basin Spring Park begins at 1 p.m. Friday, with performances by the Lark and the Loon, Chucky Wags, Brian Martin and the Black Out Boys. The annual singer/songwriters' contest runs noon-2 p.m. Saturday, followed by the Folk Festival Parade along Spring Street.

Style on 10/06/2015

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