Concerts

Bask in the blues with Shemekia Copeland in Newburyport

The "reigning Queen of the Blues" will heat up the Firehouse Center for the Arts on Dec. 30.

LOS ANGELES, CA— MARCH 18, 2022 RECORDING ARTIST, BLUES SINGER, SHEMEKIA COPELAND FOR ALLIGATOR RECORDS. Photos by Victoria Smith Make Up by KATE KATS Photo by Victoria Smith

By Blake Maddux

2 minutes to read

Simply put, Harlem native-turned-Chicago resident Shemekia Copeland is one of the most critically and popularly successful artists on the contemporary blues scene.

Nine of her 10 releases have peaked among Billboard’s top 10 blues albums, including the 2002 Dr. John-produced chart-topper “Talking to Strangers” and 2005’s “The Soul Truth,” the creation of which was overseen by the mighty Steve Cropper.

Since 2001, Copeland has won 15 Blues Music Awards – and been nominated at least that many other times – in no fewer than six different categories .

Furthermore, Living Blues magazine’s readers’ and critics’ polls have nabbed her 16 honors between 2001 and 2022, and four of her albums have been nominated for Grammys.

Talents as massive as Mavis Staples and Taj Mahal have praised Copeland’s work, with the former opining, “Her voice is strong and soulful, and her message comes from her heart,” and the latter asserting, “Shemekia’s one of the great singers of our music. I watched her grow, saw the torch passed to her from her father, and she has continued all along to honor that gift.”

The father being referenced was Johnny Copeland, an influential and successful blues singer and guitarist who recorded for nearly 40 years between the late 1950s and his death at age 60 in 1997.

In February 2021, Boston College English professor Carlo Rotella wrote a lengthy piece about Copeland for The Washington Post Magazine.

He said of “the reigning Queen of the Blues,” “The first thing most listeners notice about Copeland’s voice is its sheer force … [S]he’s in the habit of showing off the outsize instrument housed in her compact frame by stepping away from the mic and overmatching the amps of her band with her unaided voice.”

“Done Come Too Far,” Copeland’s 10th album and eighth on Alligator Records, arrived in August.

On it, she sings with her fiery brand of conviction about the distance remaining on the road to racial equality, the futility of “thoughts and prayers” in the face of mass shootings, and the danger her young son will likely one day face vis-à-vis authority figures.

And those are just the first three songs: “Too Far to be Gone” (the themes of which are further explored on the title track), “Pink Turns to Red,” and “The Talk.”

Elsewhere, she lightens the mood a bit with “Fried Catfish and Bibles,” “Fell in Love with a Honky,” and “Dumb it Down.”

From what I can gather from setlist.fm, Copeland’s visits to Massachusetts are regrettably infrequent. So yes, going to the Firehouse Center in Newburyport on Dec. 30 will definitely be worth it.