Frankie Staton

Founder, Black Country Music Association · Nashville pianist, vocalist & songwriter

Frankie Staton is a Nashville pianist, vocalist, and songwriter who founded the Black Country Music Association in 1996 and staged the first Black country showcase at the Bluebird Cafe. She has spent four decades performing across the city, working her way from a salad bar at the Marriott Airport Hotel to the grand piano at a five-star restaurant frequented by Clint Eastwood, Dolly Parton, and Minnie Pearl, and she spent ten years as a regular on Ralph Emery's WSM morning show. Along the way, publishers told her more than once that they did not believe a person who looked like her could have written the songs she played them.

In November 1996, after a newspaper story claimed there were no Black country artists to find, Frankie built the show to prove otherwise. The first Black Country Music Association showcase at the Bluebird Cafe drew five television stations, national trade press, and a reporter from the New York Times Magazine, and the crowd was so large that staff had to roll up the blinds and turn people away. She built it on the belief that the music had to be as strong as anything on the radio, and on the conviction, stated plainly in her own words, that she is not a victim, she is a victor. That belief traces back to a childhood in the segregated South, including being pulled off a stool at a Woolworths lunch counter because the counter was for white customers only, and forward through a habit of showing up for other people the way she wishes someone had shown up for her sooner.

Frankie is finishing her first memoir, A Witness at the Party, about her life in Nashville, and a country EP called Forever Loretta, a tribute to Loretta Lynn, whose story first inspired her to move to Nashville. She is available for concerts, one-woman shows, and keynote speaking engagements, and her advice to anyone facing rejection is the same one she lives by: build resilience in increments, and find the one person who says it's possible.