Award-winning blues, soul and Americana singer Shemekia Copeland possesses one of the most instantly recognizable and deeply soulful roots music voices of our time. She is beloved worldwide for the fearlessness, honesty and humor of her revelatory music, as well as for delivering each song she performs with unmatched passion. Copeland — winner of the 2021 Blues Music Award for B.B. King Entertainer Of The Year— connects with her audience on an intensely personal level, taking them with her on what The Wall Street Journal calls “a consequential ride” of “bold and timely blues.” NPR Music says Shemekia sings with “punchy defiance and potent conviction.” The Houston Chronicle describes her songs as “resilient pleas for a kinder tomorrow.”
On her new Alligator album, Done Come Too Far, Copeland continues the story she began telling on 2018’s groundbreaking America’s Child and 2020’s Grammy-nominated Uncivil War, reflecting her vision of America’s past, present and future. On Done Come Too Far, she delivers her hard-hitting musical truths through her eyes, those of a young American Black woman, a mother, and a wife. But she likes to have a good time too, and her music reflects that, at times putting her sly sense of humor front and center. “This album was made by all sides of me — happy, sad, silly, irate — they’re all a part who I am and who we all are. I’m not political. I’m just talking about what’s happening in this country.”
And she doesn’t hold back. Recorded in Nashville and produced by multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Will Kimbrough (who also produced her previous two albums), Done Come Too Far is Copeland at her charismatic, passionate, confrontational best. With singular purpose and simmering power, Copeland unleashes the searing, history-fueled tracks Too Far To Be Gone (featuring Sonny Landreth on scorching slide guitar) and Done Come Too Far (with Grammy-winner Cedric Burnside duetting and playing Mississippi Hill Country blues guitar). “If you think we’re stopping,” she sings in both songs, “you got it wrong.” On The Talk, Copeland shares the brutally honest, harrowing reality of a Black mother talking with her son about surviving an encounter with the police (with the great Charles Hodges of the famed Hi Rhythm Section on pulsating B-3 organ). On the all-t00-timely Pink Turns To Red (written and recorded prior to the May 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting), Copeland decries America’s gun violence epidemic.
Done Come Too Far’s better times and brighter days come on just as strong in the fun and swampy Fried Catfish And Bibles and the boot-kickin’, semi-autobiographical Fell In Love With A Honky. Spirits get lifted in Copeland’s celebratory interpretation of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s Barefoot In Heaven, before closing the set with the heartfelt love song, Nobody But You, written by her renowned father, the late Texas bluesman Johnny Clyde Copeland.
Copeland is used to the spotlight. Born and raised in Harlem, New York in 1979, she first stepped on stage with her famous father at New York’s Cotton Club when she was eight. As soon as Copeland released her Alligator Records debut Turn The Heat Up in 1998 at age 18, she instantly became a blues and R&B force to be reckoned with. The New York Times and CNN, among many others, praised her talent, larger-than-life personality, dynamic, authoritative voice and true star power. With each subsequent release, Copeland’s music continued to evolve. From her debut through 2005’s The Soul Truth, Shemekia earned eight Blues Music Awards and a host of Living Blues Awards. 2000’s Wicked received the first of her four Grammy nominations. After two successful releases on Telarc (including 2012’s Grammy-nominated 33 1/3), Copeland returned to Alligator Records in 2015 with the Grammy-nominated, Blues Music Award-winning Outskirts Of Love, melding blues with more rootsy, Americana sounds.

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