Tracy Nelson is an American country and blues singer from Madison, Wisconsin, born in 1944. She begins as a folk singer in coffeehouses and with The Fuller's Wood Singers while in her teens, and also sings lead with The Fabulous Imitations. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, she combines folk and blues performances in coffeehouses with rhythm and blues sets at fraternity parties.

Mother Earth and the San Francisco scene

In 1964, Nelson goes to Chicago to record her first album, Deep Are The Roots. Charlie Musselwhite plays harmonica on the record, and she spends time on the city’s south side where she meets and is influenced by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Spann and other figures. In 1966, she moves to San Francisco and becomes part of the city’s music scene. There she fronts the blues band Mother Earth, which plays the Fillmore Auditorium and shares bills with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. During this period she writes and first records “Down So Low” on Mother Earth’s Living with the Animals; the song is later covered by artists including Linda Ronstadt and Etta James, and Nelson records it several more times herself.

Recording career

In the late 1960s, Nelson relocates to Nashville, where she and Mother Earth record Make A Joyful Noise and her solo album Tracy Nelson Country. She records six Mother Earth albums for Mercury Records and Reprise Records, then continues as a solo artist on various labels. After a long break from recording in the 1980s, she releases several albums on Rounder Records in the 1990s, and since the early 2000s she records for a range of independent labels.

Collaborations and later projects

Nelson’s 1974 duet with Willie Nelson, “After the Fire is Gone,” receives a Grammy nomination. Her 1998 collaboration Sing It!, credited to Marcia Ball, Irma Thomas and Tracy Nelson, earns a second Grammy nomination. She also records under her own name and in collaboration with Marcia Ball and Irma Thomas. Other projects include the Chicago Blues Reunion with Nick Gravenites, Harvey Mandel, Corky Siegel and Sam Lay, the Blues Broads with Angela Strehli, Annie Sampson and Dorothy Morrison, and intermittent performances with the Missouri band the Bel Airs and with Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues.