country

Melissa Carper

1 festival played →

Texas songwriter and upright bassist whose vocals sit somewhere between prewar country and early jazz phrasing — old-time craft with no costume-drama pretense.

Melissa Carper grew up in North Platte, Nebraska, in a musical family, and started playing bass as a child, performing in a family band at churches and rest homes around town. She later considered majoring in music in college but left before finishing her degree.

Her music draws on prewar country, western swing, old-time string band styles and early jazz, and her singing carries the loose, behind-the-beat phrasing associated with those traditions. She writes her own material in that idiom rather than working strictly as a revivalist, and her records are typically arranged with acoustic instrumentation that leaves plenty of space around the vocal and bass.

Before settling into music full time, Carper worked at a fish factory in Alaska and lived in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she felt at home within the local gay community. She moved to Austin, Texas, in 2009 and then Nashville in 2014, where she met bassist Dennis Crouch, a connection that led to her debut solo album, Daddy's Country Gold, in 2021.

Her follow-up, Ramblin' Soul (2022), was named one of the year's best country albums by Rolling Stone, and Borned in Ya (2024) continued on the Americana imprint Thirty Tigers. She also recorded Wonder Women of Country, a six-song EP with Kelly Willis and Brennen Leigh, named among The Boston Globe's favorite albums of 2024. Her song 'Making Memories' later appeared in the closing credits of an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Read more

country