Photo Courtesy Alsha Golliher
classic country
Austin, Texas
Celebrated for her profoundly observational lyrics, her “homespun sensibility,” and a voice that curls like a croon from a gramophone, Melissa Carper plays old-school country music that resonates across time and place. Carper’s repertoire weaves together the threads of old-time, bluegrass, western swing, jazz, and blues that all intertwined in country music before the recording industry drew artificial lines and slapped on race-based genre labels. Veteran Nashville musician Chris Scruggs highlighted Carper’s versatile traditionalism when he dubbed her “Hill Billie Holiday,” declaring, “She’s as good as it gets. She has a quality that really transcends time and fashion.”
Melissa Carper’s childhood in North Platte, Nebraska, was filled with country music. She has fond memories of lying on the living room carpet with her head under the family stereo console, listening to her parents’ beloved Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn albums. From an early age, the Carper siblings sang gospel music together at churches and retirement homes, and when the kids were old enough for instruments, their mother organized them into a country band. Having taken up upright bass in fourth grade, 12-year-old Melissa naturally became the electric bassist. A childhood playing country music until midnight on the circuit of Nebraska’s rural Elks, Eagles, and American Legion halls may have been out of the ordinary, but she reflects, “My parents were dreamers, and they believed in all of us and our musical abilities.” Her high school band director, a bassist, was another mentor, and with his encouragement, she attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln on a classical music scholarship.
Drawn more to gigging and to the jazz and blues recordings she discovered in the university’s library, Carper left school for Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Years of honing her craft as a busker in this cultural hub of the Ozarks deepened her devotion to country music, as did subsequent stints in the music meccas of New Orleans, New York, and Austin. Carper’s musical journey includes membership in beloved bands like the Camptown Ladies, Wonder Women of Country, the Carper Family, and Sad Daddy. She comes to Richmond leading a power trio of women musicians, including North Carolina-based banjo and steel guitar player Rebecca Branson Jones (also a professional videographer and documentary storyteller) and New Orleans’s marvelous Myra Burnette, who plays guitar with Iris Dement and her own Miss Myra & the Moonshiners.
Carper’s experiences wandering and finding a new home in diverse communities reinforced her innate ability to channel the beauty, struggles, and humor of everyday life—a key component of the best kinds of country music. This deeply humanitarian impulse also drives her efforts to build the Natural State of Being Farm, a small-home community in Arkansas (The Natural State) designed to combat homelessness and support recovery. It also comes through loud and clear in her riveting stage shows and her five studio albums, the most recent being 2023’s Borned in Ya. “It’s a tricky thing that Carper has done,” declares the iconic No Depression magazine. “[She’s] carefully preserving the sense of romance and immediacy of the old classics. Yet by bringing her own experiences into the canon, she is unearthing a history that includes so many more of us, finally allowed to speak out through memories forgotten due to silence and taboo.”