I think I’ve enjoyed working on this piece more than any other this year. Because Wendy Moten can sing any style you throw at her, a professional’s professional, yet she has a way of interpreting that’s clearly her own. And she’s a scintillating personality and a wonderful interview. It is quite extraordinary that Music City’s best country band invited an African American woman to be a lead singer. But stuff’s moving forward around here. I wanted to focus on a written piece first, but our audio conversation is too good to hide away, so that will be the feature of this week’s String, coming Sunday. Click the image to read the full story.
Excerpt:
“My Hee Haw dreams came true,” Moten said in a recent conversation with WMOT about her formal recruitment, which was announced last Fall after months as a guest singer. “Here's a real country band, with a real audience, in a real club, a real live setting, where it's taken seriously. Their fans are serious. And I just didn't think it could be any greater. And then when they decided to make me a member, I knew I was living my country dreams. It's amazing.”
The established narrative about country music would compel me to assert at this point that an African American pastor’s daughter who grew up in 1980s Memphis must be pretty far out to have grown up with “Hee Haw dreams.” But that’s the kind of thinking that’s pressed us to the current 21st century reckoning with the history, prejudices and prospects of and for Black country music, including the question of who gets to be acknowledged and heard in twang space.
Moten is what we mean when we talk about a musician’s musician. She’s made solo albums as a Top 40 R&B singer and a jazz singer. She’s toured as a harmony and duet vocalist for Vince Gill, Martina McBride and Julio Iglesias among others. She’s a veteran of Nashville studios and stages, having developed a complete arsenal of styles and sounds to be that versatile professional vocalist who can give a producer or an artist what they need on a moment’s notice. And her passion for the whole scene was actually born watching Hee Haw as a kid.
“I thought wow, I love the music. I love the humor. And I just could connect. It was like they were inviting me into their country world,” she recalls. It was one of a number of shows that projected a world of genres and performance styles into her Memphis home, where she was second youngest of six children. She cites Soul Train and Lawrence Welk, The Midnight Special and Carol Burnett, among others. It was a broad spectrum of music and, as far as she was concerned, open doors. Being a generalist rather than a specialist may have limited her chances to be on the marquee, but with the release of 2020’s pure country album I’ve Got You Covered and a Grand Ole Opry debut late last year, Wendy Moten’s moment as a country artist seems to have arrived, in its own way and time. “It just started as a child watching that television show and loving all styles of music and being influenced by many styles of music,” she says. “And it ends here in Nashville, and those doors opened. I can't even explain it. I've had a very unconventional music career.”