Guitarist Etta Baker sustained one of the longest careers in blues history, remaining almost entirely unknown to the public while issuing recordings only sporadically and steadily refining her technique across most of the twentieth century. She entered the world in Caldwell County, North Carolina, on March 31, 1913, into a household filled with music, and she began playing guitar in childhood under the guidance of her father and other kin, absorbing traditional blues and folk numbers passed down within the family. Over the years she came to be recognized as one of the leading exponents of the acoustic Piedmont fingerpicking approach, an open-tuned method closely akin to bluegrass banjo technique, yet for many decades her audience stayed limited to relatives and friends who encountered her only at private gatherings and parties. Her first documented sessions occurred in 1956, when she appeared alongside her father and additional family members on the field recording Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, after which she again withdrew into deliberate seclusion to raise her nine children and work at a textile mill. Not until her sixties—an age when many musicians contemplate stepping away—did Baker turn to music as a profession, beginning to appear on the folk and blues festival circuit. Thirty-five years after her initial recording, she released the album One-Dime Blues in 1991 and maintained an active performing schedule through the ensuing decade, issuing Railroad Bill in 1999. She passed away on September 23, 2006, at the age of ninety-three, only months before another album was scheduled to appear.
