Local Treasures: Reba Russell

The celebrated singer, songwriter, and producer reflects on her fiercely independent career.

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To understand the story of Reba Russell, one must begin with Memphis itself, but not because the celebrated singer-songwriter is from here. Rather, it was what she discovered when she arrived here that shaped her into the powerhouse performer she is today. In her youth, neither she nor anyone else had a clue that she would become a musician and producer, much less one of the most authentic and respected women in the field today.

“As a kid, music was not even on my radar,” she confides as we sit in the living room of the semi-rural home in Oakland, Tennessee, that she shares with her husband, Wayne. An acoustic guitar, never neglected long enough to gather dust, sits at the ready beside us. “I mean, I loved music,” she hastens to add. “But I have no family with ties to it, no roots to it at all. So when I moved here in ’72 or ’73, I had an awakening. I was probably 13 or 14, and just out of the blue sky I started becoming passionate about music. Music was everywhere in Memphis then, and my brother-in-law had given me a guitar. I taught myself how to play. I still don’t really understand what was moving my fate at the time.”

The way she sees it, her luck could have soured if not for Memphis, then in its heyday as a music industry giant. It was a world away from both West Virginia, where Russell was born, and Florida, where she lived before moving here. “My dad died at an early age. It’s a long, weird story, but we were living in Florida because my mom was close to her sister down there. My two older sisters had already left home, and had come up here to be in the medical industry — nurses and that kind of stuff. Meanwhile, my brother and I were basically becoming delinquents in Florida.

“I had gotten in trouble quite a bit,” Russell continues. She was in trouble for truancy and “that kind of thing,” she says. “Then my mom moved us up here. My brother left shortly after that, so it was just me, my mom, and my sisters. Honestly, Memphis saved me. Yeah, it saved my life.”

It wasn’t just playing the guitar that came to occupy young Reba’s time. The instrument inspired her to use her voice, too. “I was playing guitar in high school, and I would sing with friends at parties. I had a little duet with a high school friend, singing at different little events. And I’d go to Audubon Park and hang out and sing.”

After she began performing, she remembers one encounter in particular that solidified the hold music’s had on her: seeing Joyce Cobb in concert at the Mid-South Fairgrounds. “I walked up to the stage and here’s this Black woman playing the guitar,” she says. “Her entire band is white, and she’s playing Jimi Hendrix, and then a couple songs later, she’s playing harp and singing. And she’s singing everything from Jimi Hendrix to Patsy Cline. You know, she’s just freaking! I stood there and I was like, ‘I want to be that. I want to do that.’ I think she had just gotten to Memphis when I saw her, and I thought, ‘If she can do this, maybe I can do this.’”

When Russell enrolled at then-Memphis State University to study voice, that newfound resolve was tested. These days, at the University of Memphis, students can study any type of singing, from jazz to pop. Back then? Not so much. “There were no cool music classes; it was all classical,” Russell recalls. “So I had to take an opera class for singing, and I would just sing Joni Mitchell or Crosby, Stills and Nash. The woman teaching the class hated me because I wouldn’t learn an aria or whatever. At the time, I was spitting vinegar, so I was like, ‘I am good. I know I’m good, and I’m never out of tune. I’m killing this thing.’ When she gave me a D in the class, I was like, ‘Screw this!’ That was disappointing for my family, because I quit going to Memphis State. I was working at a hamburger place, just making ends meet.”

“I might have been somebody — if I had kissed some more ass, if I had given in and really drank the Kool-Aid.“ — Reba Russell

Meanwhile, she kept singing. “While that was going on,” she says, “Wayne and my other friends were like, ‘Hey, you’re really good!’ He’s nine years older than me, but we had some mutual friends, and he was the one who said, ‘Hey, you sing great! I’ll help you put a band together.’ We were friends and bandmates for a long time before we were a couple.”

Wayne Russell knew what he was talking about. Growing up in a very musical family, he was already established as a professional bassist for years by the time he met Reba, playing with the likes of local luminaries Jimi Jamison and Rick Christian, even touring overseas. Paul Taylor, a longtime Memphis musician who played in the Reba Russell Band for a time, now based in Wisconsin, knew Wayne through his father, the late Pat Taylor, also a celebrated Memphis player.

“Wayne played in bands with my dad,” says Taylor, “and they knew each other for a long time. They were old friends, and Wayne can fool you into not realizing how knowledgeable and smart he is. He’s a super-solid bass player, and a super-talented painter. Yet he’s an incredibly unassuming person. And much like my dad, who did the same thing with Suzanne Taylor, he fell in love with a woman and sort of became, I think, her rock. He’s been steadily there to support her, and that’s the one of the most incredibly selfless things you could ever do as a human being.”

As they entered the ’80s, good friends Wayne and Reba began performing live around town. “R.P. Tracks was my very first gig,” she says. “As a matter of fact, I told the dude who was giving me a ride there, my friend Bill Turner, ‘Take me home. I don’t want to do this. I’m scared!’” Luckily for the club-goers that night, Turner stayed the course. “I pretty much sang with my back to the audience,” Russell recalls with a laugh.

That wouldn’t last long. She knew she was good, after all, and her confidence onstage only added to the natural power of her voice. Through a series of bands, first Visions, then Portrait, and finally Reba and the Portables, Reba and Wayne took the city by storm, performing mainly covers at clubs like Solomon Alfred’s or the Bombay Bicycle Club. In the meantime, the couple was clicking in other ways, and married in 1986.

One of their gigs was an outdoor event in Overton Square, where Russell sang Aretha Franklin’s classic, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” As Taylor relates hearing the tale, “Afterwards, this guy walked up to her, and she didn’t even know who it was, but he was like, ‘Hey, you probably don’t know me, but I wrote that song.’” It was famed producer Chips Moman, and he told her, ‘I’ve never heard anyone sing it like you just sang it.’”

In classic record-business fashion, Moman decided to develop Russell for stardom. “When Chips Moman signed me,” she recalls, “I really could have broken [through] and become something. But deep down in my heart, even though I loved it and I enjoyed it, I really felt like what I was singing and recording, from my point of view, was cheese.” Her ambitions, she decided, were more artistic than commercial.

“I might have been somebody — if I had kissed some more ass, if I had given in and really drank the Kool-Aid,” she says.

In the meantime, Russell was making a name for herself as a go-to background singer for important recording sessions, work that she still does to this day. One of the first was also one of the biggest, lending her harmonies to the Moman-produced Class of ’55: Memphis Rock & Roll Homecoming, which brought Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins together on the same album in 1986.

As Taylor notes, just having a good voice doesn’t automatically lead to that kind of session work. “If you’re a lead vocalist, your voice doesn’t necessarily blend so well as a background singer. But I think by some strange miracle, Reba and Susan Marshall, who are both incredibly powerful lead vocalists and stars in their own right, just blend so well as background singers.” Indeed, they often appear as a team, as on Jerry Phillips’ 2024 album, For the Universe. Russell’s backup harmonies can be heard on recordings by artists as diverse as U2 and Huey Lewis & the News.

Russell became well-respected among Memphis musicians and producers, but fate had more in store for her, when she met a like-minded soul, another gifted woman in the male-dominated recording industry, now considered one of the city’s best audio engineers.

“When I got with Dawn Hopkins and started making records,” says Russell, “there was no turning back, because we just kicked ass. We made a record, made all the money back, and money enough to make another record. And I just did that eight times in a row over 10 years. And we killed it, we smoked it. That was us having nothing, nobody representing us, no label, no nothing, and we still made money. So that was really the tipping point. No matter what somebody was asking me to do or buy into or whatever, I was just like, ‘Later!’”

Though that was nearly three decades ago, her partnership with Hopkins has endured to this day. That’s proof positive that when Russell said “Later!” to Chips Moman, to the covers-heavy bar band life, and to courting favor with record labels, she was onto something. Gone were the other band names. This was now the Reba Russell Band, focused largely on her own brand of blues, but staunchly eclectic.

Since 1997, the independent releases by Russell and Hopkins have buoyed a career that’s been on a steady upward curve. Through it all, the two have maintained the same defiant energy, as reflected in the name of their production company, taking the helm on albums by other artists as well, from Delta Joe Sanders to the Sister Lucille Band.

Early on in their partnership, “We were working on something in the studio,” says Russell, “and Wayne kept asking to redo a bass part, and we just shut him down. We said, ‘No, we’re keeping this. We like it!’ So Wayne said, ‘Y’all are sure some blue-eyed bitches!’ And Dawn just looked at me and said, ‘That’s the name of our production company: Blue. Eyed. Bitches.’ And it stuck.”

That outspoken defiance has marked Russell’s independent life in music from the start. “I don’t put all my eggs into one basket,” she says of not identifying with any particular scene. “I’m always a little bit on the fringe.” It’s paradoxical to hear this from an artist who’s been awarded the Recording Academy’s Premier Player Award for vocals, named an Emissary of Memphis Music by the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Memphis Blues Society last month. And yet for those who know her, it rings true.

As Taylor says, “She’s sort of an heir to Jim Dickinson, because she always remains outspoken, and she always calls the scene on its own BS. She’s never scared to tell it like it is. You know, her stances on the follies of the music industry are never hidden. I felt there was a huge hole when Dickinson left us, like that statesman to sort of tell it like it is. And Reba is the only person who embraced that role.”

At the same time, Russell has an undeniable self-effacing streak. She conveys an air of disbelief when talking about her talent or her career high points, even as she reveals no little pride in being a woman who’s succeeded on her own terms in a male-dominated industry.

“In 2018, when they gave the Reba Russell Band a brass note on Beale Street, that really was meaningful to me,” she says. “Several years before that, I kept saying, ‘No, it’s not right.’” She felt she wasn’t worthy of the honor. “But then finally I gave in, because it was like, that’s been my whole dream from the time I realized I loved music! I am a Memphis musician and man, that’s all I ever wanted to be.”